It’s on.
Absentee or mail-in ballots for the March 19 presidential primary were mailed out Feb. 8 to the voters already on file requesting one. Early voting starts March 4 and ends March 17.
Something scary happened at the home of South Miami Mayor Phillip Stoddard on Halloween four years ago: a 16-year-old boy got sick from alcohol or drugs and ended up in the hospital, where he stopped breathing three times.
Stoddard has been sued by the young man, who said the mayor let him drink alcohol and endangered his life at a Halloween party thrown at Stoddard’s house by his then teenage daughter in 2014.
“When we got there, the dad introduced himself and he showed us a table that had a bowl of fruit punch and chips and there was a bottle of alcohol sitting at the end of the table,” Loro told Ladra. “And he told us there was more fruit punch in the fridge, then went to his room.”
Hours later, Loro said, he was vomiting and had to be carried out of the house. He ended up unconscious and woke up in the intensive care unit at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
The lawsuit says that Stoddard was responsible as the adult with control of the premises under the Florida Open House Party law. It seeks an undetermined amount of damages in excess of $15,000.
“At all times material, Phillip Stoddard was aware that the plaintiff, age 16, and other underage minors were attending the party where he provided alcohol,” the lawsuit states. As the adult owner of the house, and under Florida’s open house party laws, Stoddard had “a duty to prohibit its use and availability to minors.”
Stoddard says the allegations are nonsense, “a political hatchet job” orchestrated by attorney activist Steve Cody.
And the mayor’s recollection of that evening is a bit different.
“That kid snuck onto our property and drank a lot of vodka and got sick,” Stoddard said. “He was perfectly fine when he got out of the hospital. I haven’t seen or heard from this kid since.”
He doesn’t deny that there was alcohol at the party. He denies supplying it.
“I found alcohol and I threw it away. I stood up on a chair and read them the riot act,” the mayor said. “I’ve taken booze away from these kids. My wife took booze away from them. They took it to the park across the street. I saw them holding Solo cups.”
According to an investigation report, the boy’s mother said she dropped Carlo off at about 8:30 p.m. At 11:45, she got a call from one of his friends telling her to pick Carlo up because he was sick.
“Upon her arrival she noticed that Carlos was slumped over and not responding to her commands when she spoke to him,” the report states. Mayte Loro rushed her son to the emergency room. “Upon arrival at the hospital, Carlos was falling into a deep sleep causing him to stop breathing,” wrote police officer M. Lopez.
Mayte Loro said her son stopped breathing three times. “The doctors couldn’t figure out what he had ingested in order to help him. One of the doctors told me that he must have taken some synthetic type of drug because it wasn’t coming up on the blood work or the urine test.”
Stoddard also made a statement about his daughter having a Halloween party for friends in the Coral Gables High IB program.
“About 90 minutes in, I found a mostly empty large bottle of Bacardi white rum in the kitchen — it wasn’t ours. I stopped the party, gathered all the kids, and told them that no alcohol, pot or other illegal sustances would be consumed in our house, in our yard or in the park in front of our house,” Stoddard wrote at City Hall three days later.
“All night, my wife and I patrolled the house, yard and park. My wife found kids in the park with vodka and made them leave. Apparently young Carlo Loro had obtained vodka in the park,” Stoddard continued. “I did not see that he was impaired because he had been sitting quietly on the living room sofa.”
Loro’s parents were so embarrassed, he said, they didn’t even ask for him to pay the deductible on their insurance for his hospital visit.
Stoddard says the lawsuit amounts to harassment and wouldn’t even have been filed if Cody — who has also filed ethics complaints against Stoddard for using city funds to pay his attorney — and private investigator Joe Carillo hadn’t dug up the old police information report and convinced Loro to sue.
Loro admitted that he hadn’t thought about calling an attorney until Carillo found him.
“Joe Carillo approached me and informed me that I have rights,” said the young father of a 3 month old daughter (photographed left) who works at a smoke shop. “He said what happened to me was wrong. And I told a friend who put me in touch with an attorney.”
Carillo says Cody hired him to look into Stoddard’s past behavior with minors.
“In doing so, I came across this incident and decided to investigate,” Carillo said, adding that he spoke to Loro eight times to “make sure what he was telling me was true.”
Stoddard said Carillo interrogated his 85-year-old mother and even visited his daughter at the congressional office of U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, where Stoddard’s daughter works as an intern.
“It amounts to legal harassment,” Stoddard said.
Cody is well known for creating videos that attack politicians he doesn’t like, such as former Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine and Commissioner Jonah Wolfson for having opened that quid pro quo PAC and he also created some web videos for Kristen Rosen Gonzalez in her congressional bid. He’s been long involved in politics, waging the lawsuits that created single member districts in the county.
Recently, he formed a non-profit 501(c)(4), A Better Miami-Dade Inc., so he could raise money for these fights the without having to say where he’s getting the funds. The PAC also made a contribution to Gwen Graham.
It boils down to a grudge. Stoddard should not have shut Cody down at a South Miami Commission meeting. The Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust found probable cause that Stoddard did violate Cody’s “right to be heard” under the Citizens Bill of Rights. That’s only one of the ethics complaints Cody filed. The other is for voting (he should have recused himself) on getting the city to pay his legal fees defending against the Martinez de Castro lawsuit.
“Five minutes on the microphone and this wouldn’t have happened,” Cody said.
But the bigger problem might not be in Stoddard’s actions — or lack of action — at the party that Halloween night. It might be in actions taken after to try to cover up any wrongdoing or even the perception of wrongdoing.
A police report taken at Loro’s hospital bed looks unfamiliar to the young man, now 20, and also seems scripted.
“That’s not my handwriting and it also doesn’t sound like me, like what I would say,” Loro told Ladra. And he’s right. It doesn’t sound like anything a teenager would say and, instead, sounds like it was scripted to get Stoddard off the hook.
The statement is allegedly written by Loro at 1:40 a.m. Nov. 1 — so was in between the times the boy stopped breathing? His mother said she went home to take a shower and that when she returned she was told detectives had talked to her son.
“I went to a party at the South Miami Mayor’s house and there was alcohol outside of his house in the park and I had some vodka to drink,” Loro allegedly wrote in his statement. “And there were people inside the house also drinking.
“The mayor, at one point, found a bottle in his kitchen, stopped the party, addressed the bottle and told everyone inside the house that he cannot have minors drinking alcohol on his property. He then put the bottle he found in a safe place and then left to his room. After the mayor left to his room the party continued on for the night.”
Really? Loro wrote all that by himself with no coaching? Ladra finds that hard to believe.
Another statement from Loro taken on July 27 this year disputes the statement police said he gave in 2014.
“The date and time of the statement is incorrect as well as all of the words highlighted an with my initials,” Carlo wrote, referring to practically the entire second half. “I did not write these highlighted words and what is depicted on this statement is not what occurred at the party that night.”
Using the police department to cover up any possible malfeasance or negligence is worse than the original allegation that he let teens drink at his house.
Ladra has been told that the state attorney’s office is investigating.
Incumbent South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard was able to beat back a comeback attempt by former mayor Horace Feliu 
Tuesday night, winning the race with almost 53% of the vote.
A third candidate got 7.5% leaving Feliu — who served from 2002 to 2004 and 2006 to 2010 — with just under 40 percent, according to the early results released Tuesday night.
Commissioners Robert “Bicycle Bob” Welsh and Josh Liebman were both unopposed — in what seems like an electoral nod to the status quo — but Welsh won the vice mayor’s position with 53% of the vote.
Stoddard, 58 and a biology professor at Florida International University, has been mayor for six years and campaigned on a drop in crime and the property tax rate as well as an increase in reserves.
Read related story: Former South Miami Mayor Horace Feliu wants his old job back
While Stoddard saw the police department as an asset to his campaign, Feliu, 61, made a case of some of the embarrassments the city has had in the beleaguered department. He also tried to capitalize on some discontent with the speed of some development in the city, 
particularly of homes in the residential areas, and the potential sale of City Hall.
Feliu has a little gap in his service record because he was arrested a day before the 2004 election and charged with accepting an illegal campaign contribution. He was later acquitted in what seemed like an obviously politically-motivated case.
Maybe voters don’t want to remember those days. Or maybe Stoddard got his message out to more voters. He outspent Feliu at least three to one. As of Jan. 29, the incumbent had a total of $10,195 in campaign contributions — including a check from Miami-Dade Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava — compared to $3,750.
Read related story: South Miami: Horace Feliu strikes first with email
The difference in votes was 194. That’s because in a city of 6,833 registered voters, only 1,509 cast ballots Tuesday.
Voters also rejected Tuesday a city charter amendment that would have changed the election month for city races from February to March, for whatever reason.
The newly elected majority ought to do the right thing and make another ballot question to change the election from February to August or November to increase participation.
Of course, incumbents never want to do that.
