so proficient in military skills. Watching Daoud in action, they could only conclude that Florida must be a much more exciting place than they had heard.
Let’s assume that Daoud imagines himself to be a real secret agent. Why did he get four handguns? Even James Bond carried only one at a time. Maybe the mayor wanted a gun for both ankles and both hips, in case he’s ambushed by enemy commandos at Penrod’s.
The image of a heavily armed Alex Daoud cruising the streets is unsettling. Current gun laws can’t even protect us from known felons and deranged maniacs, much less macho mayors.
Politicians shouldn’t be trusted with anything more lethal than a gavel.The way things go, it won’t be long before a burglar steals Daoud’s heavy artillery, which will then be turned against the innocent citizenry of Miami Beach.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen during a travel agents’ convention.
Live or rerun, murder is now mainstream TV
January 31, 1993
Not so long ago, parents were being warned that their kids could sneak out and buy black-market videotapes of people being murdered.
Today, snuff films have gone mainstream. You can watch them on the nightly news.
With a Miami TV crew looking on, Emilio Nunez Jr. emptied a semiautomatic handgun into his ex-wife. The tape of the killing was broadcast repeatedly by local stations, often accompanied by insightful freeze-frame analysis.
Like everyone else, I sat and watched. Pop, pop, pop. As domestic homicides go, it was noteworthy mainly for the ironic location (a cemetery), and for the forensic convenience of a camera capturing the crime.
Naturally, the Nunez tape became a hot property. TV stations all over the country picked it up. Some chose not to show the shooting, but many did. This was followed by the usual wrenching debate about violence on televisionwhat’s newsworthy, what’s gratuitous gore.
Down here, there wasn’t much discussion about whether to air the footage. It was a legitimate local story, extreme even by South Florida’s diseased standards.
Now the crime is old news, but you can still catch the video almost any evening on local TV. Nunez’s capture, his extradition hearing, his arraignment, an interview with his familyeach new event is an excuse to cue the murder tape one more time.
Most stations considerately have cut the part when Nunez stands over his ex-wife and pumps slug after slug into her body. Yet some stations continue to show the jarring first shot to the head, punctuated by the cries of the interviewer.
More chilling than the murder itself is the fact that most viewers, myself included, are tired of seeing it. The Nunez tape has been broadcast so often that it no longer shocks. It should, but it doesn’t.
Television has given America a unique intimacy with real-life violence. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live TV It was the first murder my generation ever saw, and for a long time it was the only one. There was no such thing as Insta-cam.
The Zapruder film of John Kennedy’s assassination now has been viewed by practically everybody, but for many years it was kept from the public because it was considered too horrible. These days nothing is too horrible.
Newscasters warned us that the Nunez video was graphic, but I don’t know a soul who didn’t watch it. Crime scenes always draw a crowd; hit-and-runs, holdups, lunatic sniper sprees. Video is the next best thing to being there.
Satellites feed the morbid craving. As if there’s not enough carnage here in Florida, we now get nightly recaps of the bloodiest mayhem committed across the nation. Inundated visually, our shock threshold rises with each killing we see, whether live or on tape.
Gruesome at the time, the grainy black-and-white footage of Oswald’s murder today seems prosaic. By contrast, Emilio Nunez’s graveyard frenzy unfolds vividly, closeup and in living color. Even so, the impact wears off after the 13th or 14th viewing; probably sooner, for
Let’s assume that Daoud imagines himself to be a real secret agent. Why did he get four handguns? Even James Bond carried only one at a time. Maybe the mayor wanted a gun for both ankles and both hips, in case he’s ambushed by enemy commandos at Penrod’s.
The image of a heavily armed Alex Daoud cruising the streets is unsettling. Current gun laws can’t even protect us from known felons and deranged maniacs, much less macho mayors.
Politicians shouldn’t be trusted with anything more lethal than a gavel.The way things go, it won’t be long before a burglar steals Daoud’s heavy artillery, which will then be turned against the innocent citizenry of Miami Beach.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen during a travel agents’ convention.
Live or rerun, murder is now mainstream TV
January 31, 1993
Not so long ago, parents were being warned that their kids could sneak out and buy black-market videotapes of people being murdered.
Today, snuff films have gone mainstream. You can watch them on the nightly news.
With a Miami TV crew looking on, Emilio Nunez Jr. emptied a semiautomatic handgun into his ex-wife. The tape of the killing was broadcast repeatedly by local stations, often accompanied by insightful freeze-frame analysis.
Like everyone else, I sat and watched. Pop, pop, pop. As domestic homicides go, it was noteworthy mainly for the ironic location (a cemetery), and for the forensic convenience of a camera capturing the crime.
Naturally, the Nunez tape became a hot property. TV stations all over the country picked it up. Some chose not to show the shooting, but many did. This was followed by the usual wrenching debate about violence on televisionwhat’s newsworthy, what’s gratuitous gore.
Down here, there wasn’t much discussion about whether to air the footage. It was a legitimate local story, extreme even by South Florida’s diseased standards.
Now the crime is old news, but you can still catch the video almost any evening on local TV. Nunez’s capture, his extradition hearing, his arraignment, an interview with his familyeach new event is an excuse to cue the murder tape one more time.
Most stations considerately have cut the part when Nunez stands over his ex-wife and pumps slug after slug into her body. Yet some stations continue to show the jarring first shot to the head, punctuated by the cries of the interviewer.
More chilling than the murder itself is the fact that most viewers, myself included, are tired of seeing it. The Nunez tape has been broadcast so often that it no longer shocks. It should, but it doesn’t.
Television has given America a unique intimacy with real-life violence. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live TV It was the first murder my generation ever saw, and for a long time it was the only one. There was no such thing as Insta-cam.
The Zapruder film of John Kennedy’s assassination now has been viewed by practically everybody, but for many years it was kept from the public because it was considered too horrible. These days nothing is too horrible.
Newscasters warned us that the Nunez video was graphic, but I don’t know a soul who didn’t watch it. Crime scenes always draw a crowd; hit-and-runs, holdups, lunatic sniper sprees. Video is the next best thing to being there.
Satellites feed the morbid craving. As if there’s not enough carnage here in Florida, we now get nightly recaps of the bloodiest mayhem committed across the nation. Inundated visually, our shock threshold rises with each killing we see, whether live or on tape.
Gruesome at the time, the grainy black-and-white footage of Oswald’s murder today seems prosaic. By contrast, Emilio Nunez’s graveyard frenzy unfolds vividly, closeup and in living color. Even so, the impact wears off after the 13th or 14th viewing; probably sooner, for
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