MIAMI (WSVN) - The case against an innocent man wrongfully accused of battery after a bar brawl last spring has been dropped.
Surveillance video recorded outside Asturias Sports Bar along the 4600 block of Flagler Street, at around 2 a.m., Sunday, March 31, showed several men starting a fight where one man got slashed in the face with a blade.
Some of the men ended up rolling to the ground, including a man in a white shirt who appeared to be holding the blade or other sharp object and wielding it.
Seconds later, the video shows the man, who was wearing a dark green shirt at the time, coming out of the bar holding a towel against his head after getting slashed.
City of Miami Police arrested Jorge Crusellas-Sotolongo and charged him with aggravated battery in September. On Monday, the state officially dropped the charges against the wrongfully arrested man.
“It was a mistake in identification,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said. “The laws are also there to protect the innocent, so what we did was we dropped those charges, we notified the defense attorney.”
Attorney Mark Eiglarsh, who represents Sotolongo, spoke at a press conference discussing the dropped charges. He said Sotolongo was having a drink at the sports bar when he was arrested.
“All they had to do was check the video surveillance,” Eiglarsh said. “My client pleaded with the arresting officers, ‘Just check the surveillance tape.’ The video tape would show it wasn’t me. I wasn’t here six months earlier. The officers refused to check the surveillance tape.”
After Sotolongo was arrested, detectives checked the video and let him go soon after. However, he spent a night a jail, money on bond and lawyer fees and suffered shame as a proud, hard-working man with a spotless record.
“I used to weigh 185 pounds,” Crusellas-Sotolongo said through a translater. “Now I weigh 155– horrible. I was put in a place with a lot of people. I’ve never been arrested before in this country without any problems.”
The man who held the knife has not yet been identified nor charged.
“They should say that they’re sorry for this, that they’re doing everything they can to rectify it,” Eiglarsh said. “There are wonderful police officers out there fighting every day for our liberties, and we appreciate that. This was unfortunate.”
Guns were drawn and bottles were thrown in the March surveillance video.
Eiglarsh and Sotolongo said they want policy changes at the police department, and they want officers to make watching surveillance video mandatory when there are cases like this.
7News has reached out to City of Miami Police, but they said they have no comment on the matter.
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