A Jewish man in Miami Beach was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts of attempted murder, a day after opening fire at a car in which he said he saw “two Palestinians” inside.
However, police said that the victims were actually two Jewish Israelis visiting the US. The victims, Ari Rabey and his father, initially thought they were being targeted in an antisemitic attack..
Mordechai Brafman, 27, was arrested and charged with two counts of attempted murder after he shot at the car 17 times with a semiautomatic handgun on Saturday.
Police said there was no altercation between Brafman and the two victims before the shooting, which they described as unprovoked, reports said.
According to the arrest sheet, Brafman said that while he was driving his truck, “he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both.”
Neither victim was killed. One was hit in the left shoulder, while the other was grazed by a bullet.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Brafman to be charged with a hate crime, which would increase the severity of his offenses.
Brafman, who is married, gave his occupation as plumber, reports said.
A year ago he was interviewed by local media after vandalism to a bagel store on Miami Beach that had displayed an Israeli flag, Hebrew media reported. At the time Brafman called for more unity and less conflict between people.
Ari Rabey, who was hit in the shoulder, later posted to his Facebook page about the shooting.
“Dear Jews,” he began and then explained that he was in Miami with his father.
“They tried to kill us for nationalistic reasons,” he wrote.
Rabey went on to explain that his father had been wearing a yarmulke on his head when they were driving in the car at the time of the shooting.
Surveillance video posted to social media showed the Rabeys seeking help from a building they drove to. One of the men can be seen with blood on his shoulder.
The two men later spoke to the local ABC 10 News station with Ari talking in Hebrew which was translated by his cousin.
Ari said that Brafman pulled up alongside their car, rolled down his window, and opened fire. Even as they tried to drive away, Brafman kept firing, bullets hitting the back of their car with one round grazing his father’s ear as he drove the vehicle.
Ari at first thought his father had been shot in the head, he recalled.
“God gave me my life as a gift,” he said. He was treated at the hospital and later released.
There has been a sharp rise in tensions between Jewish and Arab communities around the world since the start of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terror group Hamas led thousands of terrorists to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 as hostages to Gaza, and the subsequent war.
