Cocaine, Toyota RAV4 and .45 pistol: Evidence at center of Florida Keys man’s retrial

In the summer of 2015, a charter fishing boat in the Florida Keys was out with a group of clients and came across hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

Months later, specifically Oct. 15, 2015, a grisly double murder — one of the most high-profile homicide cases in the island chain in recent memory — was committed as a result of the crew deciding to bring the coke back to shore, divvy it up and employ a posse of local small-time drug dealers to sell it.

Both prosecutors and a defense attorney involved in the case say the load was upwards of 20 kilos of cocaine. Once the crew brought the contraband on board, they paid off the charter clients to keep quiet with either cash, cocaine or a combination of both, according to attorneys arguing both sides of the homicide case.

A 12-member jury convicted the mate, Jeremy Macauley, 41, in November 2017, of killing Carlos Ortiz, 30, and his girlfriend, Tara Rosado, 26, inside Rosado’s Cuba Road house in Tavernier near Key Largo. Monroe County Circuit Judge Luis Garcia in December 2017 sentenced Macauley to two life terms in prison for the murders and 30 more years for armed robbery.

Ortiz was one of several friends and associates Macauley commissioned to sell the cocaine, prosecutors say. The motive of the crime, according to investigators, was to silence Ortiz because he was getting greedy, increasingly unstable due to his drug addiction and demanding more money in exchange for not ratting on Macauley and the Sea Horse charter boat captain Rick Rodriguez.

Rosado was at the wrong place at the wrong time when the gunman showed up at her home, investigators concluded.

But in June 2020, the 3rd District Court of Appeal ordered a new trial because Garcia ruled the sworn statement of a jailhouse witness who said someone else inside lockup bragged about committing the crime was inadmissible during the trial.

The appellate judges said the statement should have been allowed to be heard by the jury.

Macauley’s new trial began Monday. His attorney Donald Barrett told jurors during open arguments that Macauley didn’t kill Rosado and Ortiz. Two people drove to Rosado’s home that day in a borrowed Toyota RAV4. One was Adrian Demblans, 42, who confessed to driving the getaway car. Prosecutors say the other was Macauley. His attorney says it wasn’t him.

“The question is, who was with him,” Barrett said. “It wasn’t Jeremy Macauley.”

Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts, echoing prosecutors’ arguments in the original trial, reiterated Macauley had a motive to kill the couple because he was being extorted by Ortiz, who repeatedly threatened Macauley and Rodriguez that he’d go to the cops about the drugs if they didn’t cut him in on more of the proceeds.

Katelyn Farley, Tara Rosado’s sister, said in a statement to the Herald Monday that the retrial is reopening painful wounds for both her family and Ortiz’s family.

“They got the right guy the first time. The evidence left zero room for doubt, and the fact that he would drag both our families through this twice is reflective of the content of his character,” she said.

Rodriguez was never arrested or charged in the case, and told the Miami Herald at the time of Macauley’s arrest in March 2016 that he did not know about the drugs on his boat and was not involved in the murders. Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay was adamant at the time of Rodriguez’s involvement from the beginning, but he had no proof.

McRoberts, the prosecutor, said Monday that investigators were “never able to prove what Rick Rodriguez did with his portion” of the cocaine, but, both she and Barrett said in their opening arguments that he did split the load with Macauley.

Rodriguez did not respond to an email from the Herald asking for comment.

The night of the murders

The alleged extortion texts from Ortiz became so relentless that on the night of the murders, Macauley texted Ortiz a photo of cash, telling him in a text that he was on his way to give him more money.

“That’s not how he decided to shut [Ortiz’s] mouth,” however, McRoberts said.

Demblans drove Macauley to Rosado’s house, McRoberts said. Macauley met Ortiz in the driveway, went inside with him and then shot and killed him and Rosado, she said.

Ortiz and Rosado were both shot once in the head with a .45 caliber handgun. Three of Rosado’s children were home when their mother was slain, and they spent the night and half of the next day alone with the bodies.

A neighbor, Travis Kvadus, found the children — then ages 3, 4 and 8 — in their mother’s front yard around 2 p.m. on Oct. 16, 2015. He asked them where Rosado and Ortiz were, and the children told him they were inside the home and that they were dead. Kvadus, who died in May 2017, went inside and discovered their bodies and called police.

The case was reminiscent of the type of drug hits that happened frequently in South Florida in the 1970s and ‘80s. Since those days, the Keys has regularly experienced its fair share of crime, but murders have become rare. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office launched a major investigation to find whoever was responsible for the couple’s deaths.

Two shell casings, one bullet

The sheriff’s office announced the arrests of Macauley and Demblans in March 2016, but the real break in the investigation actually happened in November 2015, when a woman visiting her brother’s Key Largo home decided to snorkel in the canal behind his house. As she was drifting along the surface, she spotted a handgun on the sea floor.

She called the sheriff’s office, and detectives were able to match the two spent shell casings and the one bullet found in Rosado’s home to the gun. Detectives said the gun was owned by Macauley.

The pistol was found underwater on one side of a small bridge that spans the canal. Sheriff’s office divers searching for more possible evidence then found a cell phone in the water on the other side of the bridge. Investigators say it belonged to Ortiz and was stolen the night of the murders.

According to prosecutors, Macauley took the phone because it contained not only text messages between he and Ortiz about the drugs and money, but also images of Macauley posing with the cocaine.

Prosecutors say Macauley threw both items in the water while Demblans drove him away from the crime scene.

Months before the case went to trial in 2017, Demblans pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact of a murder and agreed to cooperate in the state’s case against Macauley. A year later, Garcia cut two years off his sentence because he also agreed to testify against Macauley related to his charges for cocaine trafficking.

Demblans, who could not be reached for comment, has since been released from prison and is expected to testify against Macauley in the retrial.

During the original trial, he testified that he only drove Macauley to Rosado’s house so Macauley could calm Ortiz down, pay him some money and ease the tension about the extortion attempt.

Barrett on Monday contended Demblans was much more involved in the crime and that Macauley wasn’t with him on Cuba Road that night — citing cell tower data showing his phone was at his home miles away when the murders happened. He also cited a jailhouse witness pointing the finger at Adrian’s twin brother, Kristian Demblans, as the triggerman, as well as another jail inmate saying Adrian said he shot the couple.

Jailhouse witness implicates an accomplice?

One of the witnesses, Eric “Bama” Lansford, told prosecutors and detectives in October 2016 that Kristian Demblans — who was locked up at the time on cocaine and heroin dealing charges — told him that he was the one who shot Ortiz and Rosado and that his brother was going “up the road for him.”

Kristian Demblans could not be reached for comment. He was arrested again Monday on a probation violation.

Investigators found Lansford credible because he had nothing to gain by providing the sworn statement. He was a month out from finishing a jail sentence for a burglary conviction and wasn’t being offered a deal.

Lansford also told investigators that the reason he came forward is because Kristian Demblans said to him that if the children came into the room that night, he would have killed them too.

However, when Lansford was supposed to return to the Keys from Alabama to testify for Macauley’s defense in November 2017, he texted Macauley’s attorney at the time, Ed O’Donnell, Sr., saying he received threatening messages warning him he’d be dead if he showed up in the Keys. He stayed in Alabama.

O’Donnell still wanted his sworn statement to be read during the trial, but Garcia denied the request. Garcia’s denial led the appeals court to grant Macauley a new trial.

Another jailhouse witness, Anthony Wollweber, testified during the trial that Adrian Demblans — while he and Wollbeber were in jail together — told him he committed the murders.

Barrett said Monday that other aspects of the investigation show a deeper involvement in the murder by Adrian Demblans than he testified.

“Mr. Demblans went to great lengths to cover his tracks before and after this homicide,” Barrett told jurors.

One is that he borrowed the RAV4 from a friend to drive to Rosado’s house rather than use his much more conspicuous red pickup truck he owned at the time.

Most damning, Barrett said, is what happened once Adrian Demblans discovered in November 2015 that police were asking questions about his involvement in the slayings. He borrowed scuba diving equipment, including an underwater metal detector, according to Barrett, and swam the canal looking for the pistol used in the crimes.

Unbeknownst to him, the snorkeler had already found the weapon, which was now in the hands of police.

“Adrian Demblans went diving in the canal looking for the firearm, not Mr. Macauley,” Barrett said.

However, McRoberts said another key piece of evidence implicating Macauley is footage of him getting out of the RAV4 shot from a security camera affixed to Travis Kvadus’ home.

Defense attorneys for Macauley at the original trial, as well as Barrett in the current one, countered that the footage is shaky and does not clearly identify anyone.

Cocaine case and ‘the Reel G’

While Macauley’s murder case is being retried, he is serving a 15-year sentence for cocaine trafficking that is at the root of the case.

He was expected to go to trial on the charges on Sept. 17, 2018. If the case went to court, it’s likely the names of other people involved with retrieving the kilos of cocaine from the ocean would be brought up during testimony.

But in the weeks preceding the trial, Macauley took a deal and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic more than 400 grams of cocaine while armed and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He made the deal 10 months before the appellate court ordered a retrial on the murder charges.

While Rodriguez, the captain and owner of the Sea Horse, has always denied knowing about the drugs investigators say were taken back to shore on his boat, a Miami Herald investigation in 2016 showed his relationship with Adrian Demblans went back at least two years before Ortiz and Rosado were killed.

In October 2013, he transferred ownership of a charter boat he bought at auction at Whale Harbor to Adrian Demblans.

The transfer of ownership between Rodriguez and Demblans matched state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles records provided by a source and checked by the Miami Herald at the time.

Demblans renamed the boat “the Reel G” and used it to run charter fishing trips from Whale Harbor.

In April 2016, a month after Demblans and Macauley were arrested, a Miami Herald reporter found the Reel G docked in the small marina behind the Old Tavernier Restaurant & Lounge on the ocean side of the Old Highway at mile marker 90.4.

Much of the boat’s equipment and furniture had been ripped out.