HIALEAH, Fla. — Authorities say a little more than a month after her boyfriend’s arrest for robbing a food store and destroying its gaming machines in a rage over losing $3,800, a Hialeah woman walked into a police station with another man to announce she found the guy who actually did it.
But they say it turned out that Daiselys Barbosa, 31, paid the man she brought with her to get him to take the fall. She’s now facing multiple charges after police said she also hid evidence after the robbery.
Hialeah police arrested Barbosa’s boyfriend, Suniel Arzola, on Dec. 18 in connection with the Nov. 30 robbery at the RC La Atenas Market & Smoke Shop, located in a warehouse area at the corner of East 10th Avenue and 32nd Street.
Police said the 46-year-old, masked and “armed with a sledgehammer,” entered the store just after 11:45 p.m., “jumped over the counter” and forced the store clerk into the bathroom before smashing the machines and ransacking the register and stealing the clerk’s purse.
Police said footage also showed Arzola leaving on a bicycle and dropping something in the parking lot. The report states that a few minutes later, video showed Barbosa arriving in a Dodge Ram pickup to retrieve the item.
At the time of Arzola’s arrest, police said Barbosa told them that she drove to the store to play the machines just before midnight the night of the robbery when she “noticed a hammer on the ground and picked it up.”
Police said she then claimed she got back into the truck and eventually threw out the hammer, “according to her, for no apparent reason.”
Arzola, police said, denied involvement in the robbery, but did admit to losing thousands on the gaming machines earlier that day.
Fast forward to Saturday, when authorities say Barbosa showed up at the Hialeah Police Department to “turn in” a man she said “was drunk and had confessed to her that he did the robbery and not her boyfriend.”
Police said when officers spoke to the man and asked him where the robbery happened, he responded, “I don’t know, she will tell you,” pointing at Barbosa.
When officers asked him if he committed the robbery, police said he “said yes while simultaneously blinking one eye multiple times.”
With the winks evidently giving the game away, police said the man told them afterward that Barbosa paid him $4,000 to “come forward and take responsibility.”
Authorities said they contacted Barbosa on Thursday and had her come to the police station, where they arrested her.
Arzola, meanwhile, was still facing charges of armed robbery, false imprisonment with a deadly weapon and armed criminal mischief, according to Miami-Dade court records.
Barbosa joins him in facing three felonies: accessory after the fact, evidence tampering and witness tampering.
As of Friday morning, jail records show she was being held in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $10,000 bond.
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