In the days after a group of South Florida friends, including a seafood entrepreneur and a Telemundo executive, were killed in a helicopter crash in Samburu, Kenya, burglars ransacked the Coral Gables home of two of the victims, stealing more than US $500,000 worth of items, including the couple’s cars, police say.
The crash happened on Wednesday, August 19.
Sometime between Thursday and Saturday, the Valencia Avenue home of Henry Parra, 55, and Adam Hlavaty, 42, was broken into, Coral Gables police said.
The couple married in 2017, according to The Advocate.
They were remembered as a loving couple devoted to family, travel, and service.
Hlavaty was a real estate executive who founded MRKT Group, a development and design firm, the newspaper reported, adding Parra co-founded Trax USA, a Gables-based aviation maintenance software company.
They were among seven people killed when the helicopter went down. José Alberto Suárez, an executive at Telemundo/NBC, and Roger Duarte, who owned George Stone Crab, were among the dead. Also killed were Michele Sensi-Contugi, Stephany Hollihan and pilot Josh Outram.
The burglary was reported to police by the couple’s housekeeper on Sunday when she checked in on the home, according to the arrest report for the burglary suspects, 40-year-old Geybert Alexander Garcia and 24-year-old Melany Perdomo.
Police say the home was looted of items that included artwork, jewelry, electronics and business documents. The couple’s 2023 Range Rover and 2020 Porsche Taycan were also stolen, according to the report.
On Monday, one of the couple’s business partners told detectives that she used an app to find where a stolen Macbook Pro computer was located.
The business partner also used an app to find the Range Rover, according to the report.
Both pinged at a house on the 8300 block of Northwest 195th Terrace in Miami-Dade County, the report states.
According to the local media, detectives obtained a warrant on Tuesday and found both the Range Rover and Porsche backed into guest parking spaces located about 100 yards from the house.
When they entered the house, Garcia tried to hide in a second-story bathroom closet, police say. Detectives found Perdomo in an upstairs bedroom. Both were arrested and booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on felony charges, including grand theft auto, grand theft of more than $100,00 and burglary.
As of Wednesday, a judge had not set bond. Perdomo is also on an immigration hold, according to jail records.
Information on their legal representation was not immediately available. It is not clear from the report if the pair were aware Parra and Hvalaty had died when they broke into the home.
Along with the stolen items, detectives found in the house “instruments consistent with the production and/or alteration of fraudulent identification documents and personal identifying information,” the report states, adding that several IDs were confiscated.
Court records also show police found a Ford F250 pickup that was parked in the driveway of the northwest Miami-Dade home and that detectives found out it was reported stolen out of Indian River County in 2022.
It had a California license plate and an altered VIN, detectives said.
Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Mindy Glazer found probable cause for the charges and ordered them to stay away from the Coral Gables home.
In court, a family friend testified about the damage that the suspects left behind at the home.
She said the security system was broken into and the front door was also left with extensive damage that the family has to replace, including the front lock.
The helicopter crashed at 9:13 a.m. on August 19, while flying from the Loisaba Conservancy to the Ewaso Nyiro area in Samburu County, according to the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority.
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