1986 FBI Miami shootout
gun battle between eight FBI agents and two serial bank robbers and murderers in Miami in 1986
On April 11, 1986, a shootout occurred between field agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and two armed men in what is now Pinecrest, Miami-Dade County, Florida. The two men, former U.S. Army servicemen Michael Lee Platt and William Russell Matix, were suspected of committing a series of robberies and violent crimes, including a murder, in and around the Miami metropolitan area.
Although the FBI agents had partially surrounded the suspects after maneuvering them off a local road, they quickly found that the suspects were using more lethal weapons than theirs. During the ensuing shootout, Platt in particular was able to repeatedly return fire despite sustaining multiple hits.
The suspects shot and killed two special agents—Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove—and injured five other agents by gunfire. The shootout ended when the FBI agents killed both Platt and Matix as they were attempting to flee the scene.
The incident is infamous as one of the most violent episodes in the history of the FBI and is often studied in law enforcement training. The scale of the shootout led to the adoption by the FBI and many local police departments of more effective handguns; they primarily switched from revolvers to semi-automatics.
Perpetrators
Michael Lee Platt (February 3, 1954 – April 11, 1986) and William Russell Matix (June 25, 1951 – April 11, 1986) met in the early 1970s while serving in the United States Army at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Platt enlisted in the Army on June 27, 1972, as an infantryman.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1986 FBI Miami shootout” is gun battle between eight FBI agents and two serial bank robbers and murderers in Miami in 1986. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Miami, shootout and battle, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q941606. Authority coordinates are 25.657, -80.326. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1954, 1951 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “1986 FBI Miami shootout” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.