A Port St. Lucie truck driver arrested for perjury and driver's license fraud may also be wanted in Brazil for swindling, unlawful seizure, receipt of stolen goods, and a fun little thing called murder, TCPalm reports.
The Florida Highway Patrol arrested Geraldo Ricardo Miranda, 42, on Wednesday for twice providing a false Puerto Rican birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver's license in 2004. Miranda earned the perjury charge in 2006 when, to renew the license, he signed an affidavit confirming the information. FHP's arrest affidavit reports that Interpol confirmed Miranda's international fugitive status with the Department of Homeland Security.
How then does a fugitive obtain a Broward driver's license and begin hauling a cheerful bed of construction materials and fill rock through South Florida? All staff who screen
driver's licenses at the DMV are trained in fraud identification,
according to Dave Westberry, communications director for the Florida
Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Immigrants must provide
proof of identity and documentation, which the department
cross-references with a database at the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and
Immigration Services. "We also do quality control behind the scenes,"
says Westberry, citing random sample screenings.
Still,
fugitive truck driver murderers occasionally slip through the cracks.
"We've got 15 and a half million licensed drivers in the State of
Florida... There's only so many things you can do in a process like
that," Westberry says. "There are bad folks intent on perpetrating fraud
against us, and we find them and prosecute them to the fullest extent
of the law."
The St. Lucie County Jail is holding Miranda without
bond pending investigation of the international charges.
