Get Off My Lawn!

31 years after skipping bail, 87-year-old Maria Otero is sentenced to 31 years in prison for killing a 13-year-old boy for swimming in her apartment building's pool. Age has not mellowed Maria, and according to her testimony, she's still fairly certain the kid needed a bullet in the head:

In court, Otero tried to explain what happened that day in 1975 when she caught a group of boys swimming in her pool. She owned the Edgewater apartment building and lived on the fifth floor. She had run them off before but they came back. She was worried about her property insurance and, wanting to scare them, pulled out her gun.

''It was a way to get the boys to leave,'' she said Friday. ``The kids were going to drown or get hurt there.''

She insisted that she slipped on her balcony and the gun accidentally went off.

''I want the parents to understand that I am not a criminal, and I didn't do anything,'' she said. ``There are accidents every day. Why couldn't mine be an accident?''

At the 1976 trial, two of Johnnie's friends testified Otero aimed and fired at them as they were running away. Johnnie was already across the street from the apartment building when he was hit in the back of the head.

With Johnnie's parents sitting in the courtroom, Otero said she understood their suffering because her own son had died. But her sympathy rang hollow when the prosecutor questioned her, noting her son had died of cirrhosis of the liver as an adult.

''Your son wasn't 13 when he was killed. As a matter of fact, he wasn't killed, was he?'' Aponte-Frank said.

''No, because he wasn't swimming in a pool where he shouldn't have,'' Otero snapped, causing several in the courtroom, including the Miami detective who arrested her, Andy Arostegui, to gasp audibly.

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