What happens when drivers burn rubber on a South Beach street? Onlookers get to work

Howard Cohen
·2 min read

Nothing gets attention like misbehaving drivers in the middle of a South Beach intersection.

Miami Beach police arrested a tourist from Michigan after cellphone video surfaced of the driver doing “donuts” at Ninth Street and Collins Avenue around 3:45 a.m. Sunday. According to the arrest report, an officer heard tires screeching and saw two Dodge Chargers — one light blue, the other purple — driving in circles in the middle of the intersection.

Resident posts video

The cars were moving fast enough to stir up smoke and cranking up enough noise for onlookers to whip out their cellphone and shoot some video.

When officers arrived, about a minute into one of the posted videos captured by Sherbrooke Hotel owner Mitch Novick, the cars took off. The driver in the blue Dodge headed north. An officer caught up and ordered the man to stop. But, according to the arrest affidavit, he did not.

That’s when several police officers got involved and caught up to, and stopped, the driver. Police identified the driver as Davonte Darquinn Coleman, a 23-year-old whose driver’s license records list a Kalamazoo, Michigan address.

According to police, Coleman was not cooperating. First, they say he refused to roll down his window and turn off the engine. One officer opened the driver’s side door and Coleman did not want to get out. Coleman “began to tense up and pull himself further into the vehicle,” the report said.

Coleman was finally removed from the car, taken to the police station and booked into Turner Knight Guilford Correctional Center on charges of reckless driving, resisting an officer without violence, a seat belt violation, having an open container of alcohol and driving without registration or a license.

No word on what happened to the other driver in the purple Dodge.

Earlier in May, Novick posted video of a man who was sitting atop a traffic light pole and causing a crowd to gather at the corner of 10th Street and Collins Avenue in South Beach.

Not the first drivers’ donuts on SoBe

This isn’t the first time for reckless drivers to capture attention on South Beach.

In December, residents posted videos to Twitter that showed a group of drivers doing donuts at the intersection of South Pointe Drive and Washington Avenue near midnight on a Friday. That incident helped fuel the debate between business owners, elected officials, police and residents about how the entertainment district ought to operate.

In an incident not on South Beach, but in Miami Gardens, a couple of drivers stopped traffic on the Palmetto Expressway early Monday morning when they did donuts in the middle of the roadway, WSVN reported. There are no reports of arrests for that one.

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