MIAMI, Fla. – Miami police were called to a bizarre scene at Northwest Fifth Street and Fourth Avenue Tuesday night: a 6-foot nurse shark in the middle of the road.
Two men were captured on surveillance video just before 7 p.m. Monday, dragging a shark's body down North River Drive. The video shows the men holding the shark by the tail, dragging it on the pavement toward Casablanca Fish Market.
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"It was still moving. The gills were moving and the eyes were moving," said Jorge Sanchez, the owner of Casablanca Fish Market.
Sanchez pulled up his surveillance video after seeing the same shark on the news Tuesday night, sitting in the middle of an Overtown street, presumably dumped there by the fishermen who tried to sell it to him the night before.
"It was two homeless (men), and I said, 'What are you guys doing with this shark?' He said, 'I got it myself. It's 87 pounds. I want $10 for it,'" Sanchez said. "I said, 'That's not good. I'm not going to buy it,'" Sanchez told Local 10's Roger Lohse.
Renaldo Martinez, an employee at Garcia's Seafood Grille and Fish Market, said two men on bicycles also brought the shark to him on Monday and tried to sell it to him for $10.
"They brought it on a bike, tied it to a piece of wood, hooked it onto the bike and brought it here all the way from Key Biscayne," Renaldo told Local 10.
"It was very weird because usually you see kids with their friends on the bike. In this case, it was a guy with a shark on the handlebars. It was very bizarre," said Luis Garcia of Garcia's Seafood Grille and Fish Market.
Renaldo said he turned the men down because he doesn't buy fish off the street. He told Local 10 that the men then dumped the shark into some bushes before someone else dragged it out onto the street.
According to police, there were reports that the men carried the shark around on the Metromover downtown train. Investigators are working to determine whether surveillance cameras at the Metromover stations captured video of whoever might have taken the shark onboard.
It is unclear whether the shark was alive or dead when it was taken from the water and later dumped.
Officials are trying to find the people who dumped the shark.
"In my 20 years of law enforcement, I've never seen a shark in the middle of the street anywhere. It doesn't surprise me in Miami. I've seen all kinds of weird things, but a shark in the middle of the street is something completely unusual," said Officer Jorge Pino of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "It's not a major crime here. It's something unusual. It's something that we certainly would like to get to the bottom of."
Investigators determined that the shark was not a member of a protected or endangered species. Officials threw it back into the ocean on Tuesday night.
The business owners who declined the chance to buy the shark said the fish tale is really a sign of the times.
"I got the sense from watching this guy up close that he was in one of those places in life -- he was a very desperate guy," Garcia said.
Those responsible could face criminal charges, including trying to sell a shark without a license and improperly disposing of an animal, both second-degree misdemeanors.