Man found guilty of killing cyclist on Rickenbacker Causeway in 2019. He faces life sentence

A man who chose to settle a social media dispute five years ago by gunning down a cyclist on the Rickenbacker Causeway was found guilty of second-degree murder Monday — and could spend the rest of his life in prison.

A six-member jury took only three hours to determine that Kadel Piedrahita, 49, was not defending himself from potential serious harm as he rode his motorcycle along side a group of morning cyclists, including his teenage son, before firing a single fatal shot into Alexis Palencia’s stomach.

With the verdict, jurors also rejected a defense theory that Piedrahita had been beaten by three men including Palencia and that the cyclist had threatened him with a gun before Piedrahita killed him. A second weapon was never found and no witness was able to describe it. In fact, only Piedrahita claimed to have ever seen the gun and he didn’t even mention it to the first officer on the scene.

“He lied about everything else,” Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Conor Soper told jurors during his closing argument. “Why not lie about the gun?”

After the verdict was read, Piedrahita remained basically muted. Wearing a black-striped jacket, his left arm in a sling and head tilted down while standing between his two attorneys, he leaned forward and gave a corrections officer his fingerprints. Then he left the courtroom, cuffed hands in front. No family members were present, not even the son who rode along with the bikers the day Palencia was murdered.

Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Alberto Milian is expected to sentence Piedrahita in November. His attorneys made no mention of a possible appeal and didn’t address the media.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who called the shooting “tragic” and “senseless” five years ago, weighed in again after the verdict.

“I hope that the family of Alexis Palencia has gained some sense of justice with this verdict knowing that nothing can replace the senseless loss of a loved family member,” she said.

Don Pan ride turns deadly

Palencia, an avid cyclist, was killed in August 2019 during an early morning ride across the William Powell Bridge while heading into Key Biscayne after Piedrahita caught up to him on his motorcycle and the two got into a scrap. Cellphone camera video captured the shooting from different angles.

After the two men stop riding their vehicles, video clearly shows Palencia holding out a hand before Piedrahita fires. Then he places both hands on his stomach after being shot and falls to the ground. After, Piedrahita turns toward a friend of Palencia’s named Cesar Sosa, who can be seen running away from Piedrahita while carrying his bike after the shooting, yelling “Yo, no no no no.”

When the first officer arrived, he told jurors he found Piedrahita seated on the roadway, cradling Palencia. The defendant never made mention of any weapon in Palencia’s possession to the officer. Piedrahita was also found guilty of aggravated assault with a firearm against Sosa.

As the two-week trial got underway, jurors also learned that Piedrahita and Palencia had engaged in a war of words over social media prior to the shooting. Both men spouted off-color comments and made threats.

And the morning of the shooting, Piedrahita only tagged along, he claimed, because his son had just bought new tires and wanted to ride along with the Don Pan Riders — a group that regularly left at dawn from a Don Pan Bakery in South Miami and biked out to Key Biscayne and back.

Piedrahita, aboard his motorcycle, joined the group once it got past the toll booth entrance to the Rickenbacker. On his motorcycle, he filmed the bike ride on Facebook Live and added comment.

‘He wanted an excuse to use his gun’

On Monday, Assistant Miami-Dade Public Defender Elsa Fernandez told jurors during her closing argument that justice in the case was about protecting an innocent man. She said one of the lead detectives was purposely trying to mislead the jury.

She even questioned why Sosa would run to the other side of the roadway after the shooting — ignoring that her client had been charged with pointing his weapon at and threatening the cyclist.

“You’re going to leave him with the man who shot him? It does not make sense,” she said.

Also during closing, Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Arvind Singh detailed to jurors how Piedrahita used hateful speech in a Facebook Live broadcast the day before the bike ride to try and bait Palencia into an argument or committing an act that would require self defense.

“He wanted an excuse in order to use his gun,” Singh told jurors. And the man Piedrahita shot was “the person he threatened. The person he planned to confront. The person he executed.”