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Miami To Pay Nearly $1 Million To Family Of Unarmed Man Killed By Police

Nadege Green
/
WLRN

The City of Miami voted today to pay nearly $1 million to the estate of an unarmed man who was shot and killed by a Miami police officer.

Miami Officer Reynaldo Goyos killed Travis McNeil, 28, during a traffic stop in Little Haiti four years ago.

During an internal affairs interview about the shooting, Goyos said that during the traffic stop McNeil reached toward his waistband area.

“At that time I said 'don’t do it,' gave him a loud verbal command: 'Don’t do it.' And at that time I saw a black object coming up,” he said in the interview.

That’s when Goyos shot McNeil, killing him.

Investigators found no weapon in the car, only two cellphones near McNeil’s feet. 

Miami commissioners agreed to pay McNeil’s estate $975,000, but admitted to no wrongdoing. In an interview Thursday, Sheila McNeil said the money means nothing to her.

“There’s no such thing as closure when you lose a child. No amount of money will bring him back,” she said.

Officer Goyos was fired, but got job back through arbitration last year. McNeil left behind a 14-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter.

Sheila McNeil said the one positive thing about the settlement is that her grandchildren, Travis’s children, will be financially comfortable.

But she wishes her son was still here to be a father to his kids. Money can’t replace that, she said through tears.

Travis McNeil Jr. turned 14 in November. Sheila McNeil said their family threw him an all-white party. They celebrated how she imagines her son would have done for his namesake.

Travis Jr. is an honor roll student, but McNeil said she worries about her grandson, who sometimes asks, “Why did the police kill my daddy?”

“He’s becoming a young man now,” she said. “He needs his father”

At times, McNeil wonders if she could have prevented her son’s death. She thinks maybe if when the first, second or third, black man was killed by Miami police, maybe if she got as angry as when Travis became the seventh black man killed in less than in a year­ and organized and rallied the community – maybe her son would still be alive.

Few things bring her peace, but she said at least there hasn’t been another victim after her son was killed.

“We have to pray that his death won’t be in vain and I don’t think it was,” she said. “Because right after Travis died the shootings stopped.”

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