MIAMI — Pablo Lyle, the Mexican actor who fatally punched a man during a road-rage confrontation on a Miami street, was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday.
After about five hours of deliberations, jurors rejected Lyle’s contention that he acted in self-defense when he charged and decked 63-year-old Juan Ricardo Hernandez at a Miami intersection in March 2019. Hernandez fell, cracked his head on the roadway and died at the hospital four days later.
Lyle, 35, showed no emotion when the verdict was read. In the gallery, his family members began to cry. Circuit Judge Marisa Tinkler Mendez ordered Lyle be jailed — he’s facing between nine and 15 years in prison under Florida’s sentencing guidelines. He’ll be sentenced in the coming weeks, although no date has been set.
His relatives shouted “Fuerza Pablo” — Spanish for “Strength Pablo” — as Lyle was fingerprinted and led away by Miami-Dade police officers.
“This loss is devastating. We were concerned about the pretrial publicity in Miami and we think those concerns were well-founded,” said defense lawyer Philip Reizenstein, who tried the case with Bruce Lehr, Alejandro Sola and Bhakti Kadiwar.
“All my client did was protect his children," Reizenstein said. "This is a very, very difficult verdict to accept. A good man is going to be punished for acting like any father should and would have done."
The trial was being closely followed across Florida and in Mexico, where Lyle lived and had starred in several telenovelas and a Netflix crime drama. Hernandez, who came to Florida from his native Cuba in 2011, worked loading airliner food trays in for airliners at Miami International Airport.
The issue of publicity and ethnicity has been an undercurrent to Lyle’s story, particularly in Spanish-language media, where it’s normal to identify people by their Latin American country of origin. In story after story in Spanish, Lyle is routinely referred to as the “Mexican actor,” and Hernandez is called “Cuban.”
During jury selection last month, defense attorneys worried about the ethnic divide and pretrial publicity. Several times, they asked Tinkler Mendez to move the trial out of Miami-Dade County, fearing the pervasive media attention meant jurors might not be impartial. She denied the requests.
The trial was also a test of Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” self-defense law, passed in 2005, which eliminated a citizen’s duty to retreat before utilizing force to counter a deadly threat. Lyle’s defense attorneys argued that Hernandez was still a threat as walked back to his car because he could have been going to get a weapon. None was found in the car.
The encounter on a Miami roadway on March 31, 2019, was captured on widely seen video surveillance — evidence that both prosecutors and defense attorneys believed was crucial.
That evening, Lyle and his family were heading to the airport after a 10-day vacation. They were in a SUV driven by his brother, Lucas Delfino, who got off on the wrong exit and cut off Hernandez as he tried to get into a left lane to make a U-turn.
Hernandez honked his horn, and when the cars stopped at a red light, he got out his car and approached the SUV at the intersection of Northwest 27th Avenue and 14th Street.
At trial, Lyle’s defense attorneys cast Hernandez as an unhinged attacker, banging on the door and cursing, terrifying Lyle’s two children and wife inside.
“Looking over the video, Mr. Hernandez is trying to open that door,” Reizenstein told jurors Monday.
Delfino also hopped out of his car and the two argued, before the SUV began rolling into the intersection because it wasn’t in park. Delfino ran back to the SUV, while Lyle had gotten out to try to stop the car from rolling. That’s when Lyle ran at Hernandez — who had walked back to his car — and delivered the fatal punch. A crucial eyewitness also told jurors that Hernandez raised his hands in self-defense and yelled out “No! Please, don’t hit me” before the punch landed.
Lyle and his family drove off. He was later detained at Miami International Airport.
Prosecutors Shawn Abuhoff and Gabriela Alfaro told jurors that Hernandez committed no crime, and made no threats, when he tapped on the SUV’s window to voice his “discontent” with being cut off. They said Lyle — who was taller and more fit than the older Hernandez — escalated a confrontation that was already over when Hernandez walked back to his car.
“This video is not a scene from a soap opera. It’s not a scene from a movie. It’s not rehearsed. It’s not scripted. It’s real,” prosecutor Alfaro told jurors Monday during closing arguments. “It shows you what (Lyle) was feeling was not fear. It was anger. It was not necessary to protect himself or anyone in that car.”
State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, in a statement, said the verdict “shows the outrageous destructiveness of ‘road rage’ incidents.”
“Two lives were destroyed by simple roadway anger, a situation we see far too often on our streets and on streets across the country,” she said.
———
