Terrill Girard and Peggy Domingue. {Margate PD}
By Kevin Deutsch
Margate Police Detective Julio Fernandez was named the department’s 2022 Officer of the Year Award Wednesday for his “exemplary service” to the police force and Margate’s citizens.
Detective Julio Fernandez doggedly investigated and solved eight cold cases in recent years: seven in Broward County and one in Miami-Dade County. The 22-year policing veteran, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, convinced his superiors to re-open the cases for investigation and solved them one by one. He began working Margate cold cases part-time in 2015 and full-time in 2017.
“To me, it was very rewarding,” Fernandez said during Wednesday’s city commission meeting, where he received the prestigious award. “I only was able to do it because the Margate Police Department allowed me to do it.”
In a commendation letter to Fernandez, Margate Police Chief Joseph Galaska told Fernandez, “Throughout the year, you have distinguished yourself on numerous occasions as an integral part of this department by re-opening ‘cold cases’ for investigation.”
“These cases consist of missing persons, skeletal remains, homicides, and one sexual battery case. The majority of these cases are over 2o years old,” Galaska wrote. “Without your dedication and commitment, the victims and families in these cases would likely never have had closure. Successfully closing seven [Broward] cases is unprecedented in the history of the Margate Police Department!”
Two of the cold cases involved missing mothers from Margate. One of the women, Terrill Girard, 39, went to pick up her two daughters from school on January 3, 2002 and was never heard from again.
Her bones were found by people riding airboats in 2004, about 300 yards from where her vehicle had been found.
Fourteen years later, in 2018, Fernandez sensed the set of remains in the Everglades could be Girard’s. That year, Girard’s daughter’s DNA was uploaded into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Detectives got a match for the Everglades remains, and the Girard mystery was solved.
Fernandez also solved the baffling disappearance of another Margate woman, 41-year-old Peggy Domingue, with the help of a DNA sample from her daughter.
In a separate cold case investigation, the detective identified and helped capture an alleged serial rapist, Russell McLean, 65, who police said brutalized a series of women inside their Margate and Tamarac homes in the 1990s before escaping to Jamaica.
Det. Julio Fernandez [Margate Police]
McLean is charged with multiple counts of armed sexual assault, armed kidnapping, burglary, and other crimes stemming from the series of attacks that terrorized Margate and Tamarac residents in 1996 and 1997.
Galaska told Fernandez he was “extremely pleased and exceptionally proud to bestow upon you one of the [department’s] most prestigious awards.”
Fernandez previously told Margate Talk he feels deeply for the families he met during his investigations.
“For me, it’s very simple…it’s about the victims,” he said. “I know the pain and suffering families have to go through.”
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