For 20 minutes Burke estimates the officers drove him around before finally releasing him in a dark and desolate section of South Dade nearly a mile from his home.
“They put me off somewhere in Goulds. There were no street lights and no houses,” he said. “It was just dark.”
CBS4′s Jim DeFede asked, “Did you tell the officers you were blind?”
“Yes I told them in the car I was blind and I couldn’t see,” Burke said.
DeFede then asked, “Did they seem to care?”
“Not that I know of,” he answered. “They put me out somewhere where they aren’t no street lights and no houses.”
Out on the edge of some vacant farm land, they made him sign an arrest form he couldn’t read.
Burke said he asked them to drop him off closer to his house, but they refused.
He had no cell phone. The police had taken it.
DeFede asked, “Were you mad or angry?”
“I was trying to get home. That’s all it was. I was just trying to find my way home,” he said.
Unsure of where to go, Burke started walking. He kept his right foot on the road and his left foot in the weeds to prevent him from wandering into the middle of the street where he might get hit by a car.
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