Broward State Attorney Admits Mistake That Allowed Murder Suspect To Avoid Trial

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PEMBROKE PARK (CBSMiami) – Luis Rodriguez sat at a Pembroke Park bus stop on October 3, 2016, waiting to go home after working his landscaping job.

He would never make it.

Instead, the Broward Sheriff's Office says he was confronted by a stranger named Stanley Rivers.

That set in motion of series of events that left Rodriguez dead, Rivers charged with murder and ultimately freed because of a significant oversight by prosecutors, they admitted, missing a key deadline to file criminal charges.

It's a mistake the Rodriguez's sisters find hard to accept.

"Very unfair. Very, very unfair," said Rodriguez's sister, Carmen Vargo.

Vargo said she will always remember her brother as full of life — "He was happy all the time, she said.

That's why it's still hard for them to imagine why someone would shoot and kill Rodriguez, the victim of a possible robbery gone wrong.

"How could you just take his life for just a couple of dollars?" said Vargo.

911 calls from the day of the shooting captured the chaos.

"It's a man outside dying," one caller said. "He's just been shot."

"A guy on a bike just shot a man," another caller told a 911 operator.

A man named Stanley Rivers became the suspect in the murder. Investigators with the Broward Sheriff's Office say surveillance video captured Rivers riding on his bicycle away from the crime scene as he tossed an object into a truck. Investigators believe that object was a shoe, which had Rivers' DNA inside it and Rodriguez's blood on the front of it. Detectives also recovered this broken necklace from the crime scene with Rivers' DNA on it. They confronted Rivers with what they found.

"That shoe — your DNA is in that shoe," a BSO detective told Rivers. "This guy's blood is all over that shoe. The shoe that you threw into the back of that truck when you were riding away on your bike."

Later the detective said, "The jury is going to see that your necklace is on scene, it's ripped and your that DNA is all over that necklace."

Rivers' reaction?

"Not me. You got the wrong dude for that one," Rivers said.

The detective responded, "There's no one else running around with your DNA, Stanley. That's the problem."

Rivers said he no longer owned a necklace like the one found at the crime scene and he said that he often shared shoes with other people. Despite that, detectives arrested Rivers for murder and Rodriguez's family felt relief.

"Thank God that this man isn't on the streets because another family could go through what our family is going through with the loss of our brother," Vargo recalls thinking.

Then in January of 2017, detectives received another piece of evidence against Rivers. An inmate at the Broward County Jail, Sirjimmy Callins, told detectives that he was a longtime friend of Rivers and that before Rivers was arrested, Rivers confessed to Callins that he murdered Rodriguez.

"He said that was me that had done murdered that (expletive) at the bus stop," Callins told the detective.

Callins said he didn't want any type of deal for telling his story.

"I have a family member who was killed in the same manner — a robbery gone bad," Callins said in the interrogation room. "An innocent person lost their life for no reason just cause you want something from there and they not gonna give you what the (expletive) they worked hard for."

However, in a court memo, Broward prosecutors wrote that they had questions about the case. An eyewitness refused to cooperate. There was no foreign DNA found under Rodriguez's fingernails despite signs of a struggle. The surveillance video was from such a distance that you couldn't positively tell who was riding the bicycle and prosecutors did not find Callins credible.

And this is where River's story takes a turn. Prosecutors had 175 days to file what's known as an information against Rivers. Those are the formal criminal charges and that is standard procedure. Prosecutors missed that deadline by 6 days. Because Rivers did not waive his right to a speedy trial his defense attorney said the judge had to dismiss the case against Rivers and that's what the judge did, letting Stanley Rivers walk out of jail a free man.

The judge wrote, "Mr. Rivers is entitled to an immediate and permanent discharge from the crime alleged."

Legal experts say missing that deadline means a murder charge can never be brought against Rivers again in this case. That leaves Rodriguez's family feeling like they've been victimized again…this time by the prosecutors they expected to bring them justice.

"They didn't do their job," said Vargo. "Really and truly what it comes down to cuz they needed to file that paperwork on time and they didn't.

CBS4 News asked to speak with on camera with someone from the State Attorney's Office. They declined and sent us a statement. It reads in part: "We acknowledge an error by our prosecutor which allowed too much time to lapse under Florida's speedy trial statute. Subsequently, in accordance with case law, the court was required to dismiss the second-degree murder charge against Stanley Rivers. We reached out to the victim's family to explain the circumstances of why the case was dismissed. As we move forward, we are diligently working to improve our casework protocols for our prosecutors to avoid such errors in the future."

We're told the prosecutor on the case, Heather Henriksen, has an unblemished record and was counseled after the error.