The next day's newspaper was full of news.
The big story was the rogue wave, estimated to be somewhere between eight and twelve feet high, that hit both South Florida and the Bahamas. The wave was felt by even the big freighters; it capsized a number of smaller boats, although fortunately nobody was hurt. It was also fortunate that the wave hit at night, when there were few people on the beaches. There were some scary moments and a fair amount of damage, but nobody drowned.
The cause of the wave was, for the moment, a mystery. The best guess from the experts was that it was caused by some freak seismic event on the seafloor under the Gulf Stream. Rogue waves had hit Florida before; Daytona Beach had had one in July of 1992. As one oceanographer quoted in the newspaper put it: "Every now and then, Mother Nature throws you a curve."
There was also a dramatic story of a hijacking attempt aboard an Air Impact! turboprop flight from Miami to Freeport. A man — described by one of a group of retirees who'd been on the plane as "a complete lunatic" — managed to smuggle a gun on board and ordered the pilot to take off without clearance. A Miami police officer, Monica Ramirez, had somehow — details were not yet available — gotten on the plane and tried to apprehend the hijacker, who had shot her. Other passengers had also fought the hijacker, and during the struggle, he had apparently fallen from the plane to his certain death in the ocean. Officer Ramirez, who was described by the police chief as a hero, was still alive when the plane returned to Miami; she was in critical condition, but doctors said her chances for survival were good. A passenger identified as Edward Porter also sustained a gunshot wound to the leg; he was listed in satisfactory condition.
By bizarre coincidence, there was another, totally unrelated story involving the airport at around the same time. Somehow, a thirteen-foot python had gotten loose in the main concourse and attacked a passenger, identified as Leonard Pflund, a forty-two-year-old consultant from East Orange, New Jersey. He was rescued by his business associate, identified as forty-seven-year-old Henry Algott, also of East Orange, who killed the snake with a handgun. Police had taken possession of the handgun and detained Algott pending further investigation of the incident. Police said they would file charges against the snake's owner, Neil Hart, when he was released from the hospital, where he was being treated for injuries sustained while resisting arrest.
Police reported two unusual incidents in Coconut Grove. In one, a man identified as Jack Pendick, twenty-eight, of the Harbour Oakes Manour Trailer Court in Cutler Ridge, had been apprehended after firing a handgun several times near the Coco Walk shopping complex. Nobody had been hurt, but the incident and subsequent apprehension of Pendick had attracted a crowd of tourists, who had temporarily blocked Grand Avenue. A few hours later, in a residential section of the Grove, a Miami police officer identified as Walter Kramitz had been discovered in the middle of Garbanzo Street handcuffed to a large metal object, along with a local business executive identified as Arthur Herk. This apparently was the result of a home-invasion-style robbery at Herk's home, but the details of the incident, and especially how Kramitz and Herk ended up in the street, were still sketchy.
Finally, traffic on busy Le Jeune Road had been shut down completely for several hours when a group of goats had somehow gotten loose on the roadway.
The newspaper ran this story as a «bright» on the bottom right-hand comer of the front page, with a picture of a sweating animal-control officer, surrounded by cars, chasing a frisky, cheerful-looking goat. This picture produced identical reactions in thousands of readers: They shook their heads, smiled, and said, "Only in Miami."