A woman from Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood is facing a series of felony charges after Miami-Dade police accused her of a bizarre series of crimes beginning with a stolen pressure washer and ending with a burning Mazda in a farm field.
Police arrested Iviss Aburto, 27, on Tuesday, but, according to an arrest report, the series of crimes began Feb. 24 in the Palmetto Estates area of southwest Miami-Dade.
According to the report, just before 3 a.m. on that day, Aburto went to her ex-boyfriend’s house on Southwest 156th Street, entered his yard without permission and began to drag a pressure washer belonging to a second victim to her blue Mazda CX-5, which was parked down the street.
“Due to previous altercations, (Aburto’s ex-boyfriend) decided to call police for assistance,” the report states. “While he and (the other victim) were outside checking for any damage to the vehicles on the driveway, as similarly caused to another vehicle by (Aburto) in the past, he observed a vehicle driving at a high rate of speed down the street abruptly turn onto his driveway.”
According to police, Aburto was behind the wheel. Driving her Mazda straight at the pair, her ex took out a gun and began firing at her vehicle multiple times in fear for his life, the report states.
The report states Aburto reversed, then put her car in drive again, purposely crashing into a gray Toyota Corolla used by the second victim, before driving off.
That victim later told police that Aburto had vandalized her vehicle in a similar manner in the past, but she chose not to report it to police, according to the report.
Early the next morning, an officer on agricultural patrol saw Aburto’s Mazda on fire in an open field near the intersection of Southwest 138th Terrace and 162nd Avenue, abutting southwest Miami-Dade’s Country Walk area, police said.
According to a second police report, Aburto had reported the vehicle stolen hours after the Feb. 24 incident.
She told Miami police and her insurance company that her car had been stolen from her home on Southwest Eighth Avenue sometime between the evening of Feb. 23 and morning of Feb. 24, the report states, saying she had last seen her vehicle the night of Feb. 23.
Surveillance video, however, showed Aburto driving the Mazda during the Feb. 24 incident and cellphone data obtained by Miami-Dade police placed her in the same farm field where the car was found ablaze, the report states.
According to police, Aburto had been behind on her auto insurance payments, but brought her policy up to date in the hours between the driveway incident and when she set the SUV on fire.
Police arrested Aburto at her workplace, a mortgage company in Coral Gables, Tuesday afternoon.
She was taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count each of felony criminal mischief, tampering with evidence, second-degree arson, burning to defraud an insurer, filing false insurance claims and filing a false police report in the commission of a crime.
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