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A man killed a Cuban mother and her three-year-old son before taking his own life outside a Chase bank in Miami-Dade.
The incident occurred on Friday morning at a shopping plaza in Kendall West, located at the intersection of Bird Road and Southwest 152nd Avenue.
Detective Luis Sierra from the Miami Police confirmed that the assailant was in a truck and stopped outside the bank, next to a minivan where a mother and her son were waiting for their turn at the ATM. The man got out and shot at them multiple times with a long gun, then returned to his vehicle, sat in the passenger seat, and took his own life.
A sergeant from the Kendall district of the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) was patrolling the area south along Southwest 152nd Avenue when he heard the gunshots. Upon arriving at the scene, he discovered the three bodies.
The two victims have been identified as Odalys Bancroft, a 43-year-old Cuban nurse, and Theodore Cuoto, who will turn four years old next month.
The boy was the only child of his mother and Vicente Couto, who was also Cuban.
The family confirmed that she was divorced and had recently been in a relationship with a man from whom she was trying to separate, to the extent of even requesting a restraining order against him.
It is believed that it was her ex-boyfriend who killed her, although this has not been officially confirmed. His identity has not been disclosed to the media.
The cause of the crime has not been explained either.
Odalys Bancroft, who appears on her Facebook account as Odalys María, was the director of regulatory affairs at Jackson Health System, where she began working in 2015 as a clinical nurse. Recently, she was serving at Holtz Children's Hospital.
According to Carlos Migoya, the executive president of the institution, he was a person who left a deep mark on the organization.
"Odalys deeply believed in the work we do and never shied away from expressing her pride in Jackson. Jackson is better because of Odalys and the indelible mark she left on our organization," he stated in a statement.
Family members set up two accounts on the GoFundMe platform to assist with the funeral expenses for Odalys and little Theodore.
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