Pablo Ibar: Miramar Triple Murder, Three Trials, and New Witness

The Pablo Ibar case is the decades-long Florida prosecution of a dual U.S.-Spanish citizen for the 1994 execution-style killings of nightclub owner Casimir “Butch Casey” Sucharski and two women, Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers, at a home in Miramar. Ibar has been tried three times, sentenced first to death and then in 2019 to life in prison, and has maintained his innocence throughout. In June 2025, his defense filed new motions built around a previously unknown witness who claims different men, tied to a Colombian drug organization, carried out the murders.¹

The 1994 Miramar Murders

In the early morning of June 26, 1994, two armed men entered Sucharski’s Miramar home through a patio door. Sucharski, 48, owned Casey’s Nickelodeon, a bar in Pembroke Park, and had come home that night with Anderson and Rogers, both 25, who had been at the club earlier. The intruders beat Sucharski, bound the two women, and shot all three in the back of the head as they lay face-down.¹

What the killers did not know was that Sucharski had hidden a surveillance camera in a bookcase. The camera recorded the attack, capturing two intruders as they moved through the house and took items including Sucharski’s watch and boots. At one point, one man removed the T-shirt he had been using to cover his face and was briefly visible on the tape. The second wore a cap and sunglasses throughout and was never clearly shown.²

Investigators concluded Sucharski was the target. Some valuable items, including a Cartier watch, were left behind. Detectives found wadded duct tape at the scene, which they associated with cocaine packaging, and believed Sucharski was involved with drugs and kept large amounts of cash at home.¹

How Ibar Became a Suspect

Miramar police distributed flyers with images pulled from the grainy surveillance footage. About three weeks after the murders, Metro-Dade officers told Miramar detectives that a man matching one of the flyers was in custody on an unrelated home invasion robbery. That man was Pablo Ibar, arrested alongside Alberto Rincon and Alex Hernandez.²

A roommate of Ibar’s named Jean Klimeczko became a critical early witness. Shown the flyers, Klimeczko identified Ibar as the man who removed the face covering and identified another roommate, Seth Penalver, as the second intruder. Klimeczko also told police that on the morning of the murders, Ibar and Penalver had rushed into their shared home, grabbed a Tec-9 firearm, and left.³ Both men were charged with three counts of premeditated first-degree murder, robbery, attempted robbery, and burglary.⁴

Why the Evidence Has Always Been Disputed

No fingerprints from the home matched Ibar. DNA extracted from blood, hair, and cellular material on the blue T-shirt used as a face covering all excluded Ibar as the source in early testing.⁵ The prosecution’s own closing at the original trial acknowledged “there is no question in this particular case there was no physical evidence to connect the defendants to this particular case.”⁶

The surveillance video was central to the state’s case but was repeatedly described by courts and witnesses as “fuzzy, grainy, gray, shady, blurry and distorted.” Six witnesses shown video stills stopped short of positive identifications at trial, saying the person in the images “was not” or “may resemble” Ibar. Police detectives then testified that those witnesses had positively identified Ibar in pre-trial interviews, and the trial court allowed the jury to treat that officer testimony as substantive evidence.⁶

Klimeczko later told the court at the second trial that he had “no memory of his earlier statements.”³ Neighbor Gary Foy, who had briefly seen two men driving away in Sucharski’s Mercedes-Benz, failed to pick Ibar from a photo array but later identified him at a live lineup. The defense argued that lineup was “unduly suggestive” and conducted without counsel despite Ibar’s request.⁷

The defense also pointed to Alex Hernandez as an alternative suspect. Hernandez wore the same shoe size as the bloody print left at the scene, and a search of his room turned up bloody footwear and a live round of ammunition. The investigation into Hernandez and other potential suspects was dropped once police focused on Ibar.⁶⁴

Three Trials Over Two Decades

Mistrial in 1997

Ibar and Penalver were first tried jointly in 1997. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict and the judge declared a mistrial. During that trial, Ibar’s mother, Maria Casas, testified that the man in the surveillance footage was not her son: “I kept saying no, it’s not. You know, it’s not Pablo. I don’t see no resemblance.”⁸ The trial judge briefly threw out the case at one point due to the lack of fingerprint or DNA evidence, though it was revived.⁹

Conviction and Death Sentence in 2000

Ibar was convicted on August 28, 2000, and sentenced to death by Judge Lance True Andrews.² Casas had died in 1998, so a transcript of her earlier sworn testimony was read to the jury. The prosecution then used a detective’s testimony to impeach her recorded words, claiming that during a 1994 police interview she had actually identified her son as the person in the video.⁸ Ibar’s defense attorney, Kayo Morgan, was later cited by the Florida Supreme Court for “serious mistakes” and “numerous deficiencies and failures.”¹⁰

The Florida Supreme Court Vacates the Conviction in 2016

In February 2016, the Florida Supreme Court vacated Ibar’s death sentence and ordered a new trial in a 4-3 decision. The court found trial counsel constitutionally ineffective, particularly for failing to retain a forensic anthropologist or facial identification expert to challenge the video. The ruling emphasized the “lack of any DNA or physical evidence linking Ibar’s involvement to the murders” and characterized the state’s evidence as “scanty and weak.” A facial identification expert named Raymond Evans had testified during post-conviction proceedings that the surveillance images were of “very poor quality” and “not adequate to make a reliable identification,” pointing to discrepancies in facial proportions between Ibar and the person in the video.⁵

Retrial and Life Sentence in 2019

The retrial took place in Broward County before Circuit Judge Dennis Bailey. This time the prosecution introduced DNA evidence that had not existed at the earlier trials. Using a computer system called TrueAllele, developed by Cybergenetics, analysts reprocessed DNA data from the T-shirt. Dr. Mark Perlin, the system’s chief scientist, testified on December 20, 2018 that the analysis “unmixed” the DNA mixture and found a match to Ibar “353 trillion times more probable than coincidence.”¹¹

Defense attorneys Benjamin Waxman and Joe Nascimento challenged that evidence on several fronts. They argued the T-shirt’s evidentiary value was compromised because its evidence bag “had been opened and reopened so many times” that the testing lab documented concerns about its condition.¹²¹

The shirt’s testing history was itself unusual. Before 2010, testing had produced no link to Ibar. In 2010, Ibar’s own defense requested retesting, hoping to identify someone else; the results again did not match Ibar and identified material from an unknown person. In 2016, prosecutor William Sinclair requested that the same DNA expert test the shirt against Ibar’s sample using newer methods, and this time a partial match was found.¹²

On January 19, 2019, after 22 hours of deliberation over four days, the jury found Ibar guilty. During the penalty phase, defense attorney Kevin Kulik presented letters from the victims’ own family members, including Sucharski’s daughter, Anderson’s sister, and Rogers’ mother and brother, all asking for mercy rather than death. On May 22, 2019, after about ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury recommended life in prison, and Judge Bailey imposed that sentence.¹³

Seth Penalver’s Acquittal

The path of Ibar’s alleged accomplice diverged sharply. Seth Penalver was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to death. In 2006 the Florida Supreme Court overturned that conviction, citing “problems with evidence.”¹⁴ At his 2012 retrial, a forensic anthropologist testified in support of the argument that Penalver was not one of the men on the video.¹⁵ After a five-month trial and 10 days of deliberation, the jury acquitted him of all charges on December 21, 2012. He had spent 18 years in custody.

Ibar’s supporters have pointed to that outcome ever since. If a jury found one of the two men allegedly on the surveillance footage not guilty, they argue, the identification evidence used against the other is equally unreliable. Ibar was still on death row when Penalver walked free.

The 2025 New-Witness Motion

In June 2025, defense attorney Daniel Tibbitt filed a 38-page motion seeking to vacate Ibar’s conviction based on what the filing calls “newly discovered evidence.” The motion is built around a previously unknown witness whose identity is under seal for safety reasons; the person lives in another country. According to the filing, the witness worked for a Colombian drug organization and says two men identified as “A.N. aka El Loco” and “F.B. aka Loeva” confessed to carrying out the 1994 killings as a drug hit on Sucharski. The hit was allegedly ordered by a figure identified as “C.P. aka El Gordo” because Sucharski had been stealing narcotics.¹¹⁶

The witness says they were asked to participate in the hit but declined because they were out of town. The defense argues this information is not entirely new to law enforcement: the witness allegedly shared the same account with federal and Miami-Dade authorities during a 1996 arrest on drug trafficking charges, and that exculpatory information was never disclosed to Ibar’s legal team.¹ On June 23, 2025, Tibbitt filed a second motion arguing that Ibar’s trial attorneys had been ineffective.¹⁶ The Broward State Attorney’s Office has 180 days from the filing to respond, and a hearing was scheduled for August 7, 2025.¹⁷

Spanish and Basque Support

Ibar holds both American and Spanish citizenship and is of Basque descent. His father, Cándido Ibar, emigrated from the Basque town of Zestoa to the United States in 1968 as a professional jai alai player.¹⁸¹⁹ The Association Against the Pablo Ibar Death Penalty, led by spokesman Andrés Krakenberger, has spent years raising money for his defense, estimated at roughly $1.3 million for the retrial. As of 2016, the group had raised slightly more than half that amount, and the Basque Country government contributed $50,000 toward the legal defense.²⁰ In 2017 the association added a crowdfunding campaign on top of more than €701,000 already raised in aid and donations.²¹ In November 2018, a delegation of roughly 10 members of the Spanish Parliament traveled to Fort Lauderdale to attend Ibar’s retrial.²²

Ibar has now spent more than 30 years behind bars, including nearly 16 on death row before the 2016 reversal. He is serving a life sentence in a Florida prison while his defense pursues the 2025 motions.

1
Miami Herald. New Witness Comes Forward in Casey’s Nickelodeon Triple Murder Case
2
Florida Legislature. Pablo Ibar – Capital Cases
3
vLex. Ibar v. State
4
Florida Supreme Court. Penalver v. State, Initial Brief of Appellant
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FindLaw. Ibar v. State, Florida Supreme Court
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Florida Supreme Court. Ibar v. State, Appellate Brief
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Florida State University. Ibar v. State, Oral Argument Transcript
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Florida Supreme Court. Ibar v. State, Initial Brief of Appellant
9
El País. Pablo Ibar, From Death Row to a New Trial
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NBC Miami. Man on Death Row for Broward Triple Murder to Get New Trial
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Cybergenetics. Pablo Ibar Convicted After TrueAllele Unmixes DNA Evidence
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Orlando Sentinel. Ibar Defense Asserts His Innocence at Casey’s Nickelodeon Murder Trial
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Sun-Sentinel. Casey’s Nickelodeon Killer Gets Life as Jury Shows Mercy
14
NBC Miami. Seth Penalver Acquitted in 1994 Miramar Triple Murder
15
Forensic Magazine. DNA Mixture Sorts Out Triple Homicide Conviction in Florida
16
Sun-Sentinel. Witness Comes Forward With Newly Discovered Evidence in Casey’s Nickelodeon Murders
17
NBC Miami. New Witness Comes Forward in Notorious 1994 Triple Murder Case in Miramar
18
El País. The Lonely Battle of Pablo Ibar
19
Marca. Pablo Ibar, el Sobrino de Urtain
20
San Diego Union-Tribune. Relatives of Pablo Ibar Seek Institutional, Financial Help in Spain
21
El País. Crowdfunding Campaign for Pablo Ibar
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LA Times. Spanish Parliamentary Delegation Attends Pablo Ibar Trial