Prosecutors decline charges in the 2009 shooting of Corey McNeal
Two Miami police officers will face no criminal charges in the 2009 shooting death of Corey McNeal, according to contemporary reporting on the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s review.
The case concerned a November 14, 2009 encounter in Allapattah involving officers Omar Ayala and George Diaz. Reporting on the prosecutor’s memo described a struggle, a box cutter found near McNeal and a shooting in which he was struck 27 times.
The decision left important questions unresolved. The officers did not provide investigators with accounts of the encounter, and there were no radio messages explaining the events immediately before the shooting. Those gaps limited prosecutors’ ability to reconstruct what happened.
Declining to prosecute did not amount to a finding that every action in the encounter was justified. The contemporary accounts distinguish the absence of criminal charges from a complete explanation of McNeal’s death.