Miami Beach doctor was charged with sex trafficking a minor. Then she was found dead

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Note: The names of the victims have been changed to protect them and their families.

To this day, the Miami-Dade state attorney does not know how the key witness in a high-profile sex trafficking case wound up dead.

It’s been a year and a half since Gina was found floating face down in the Little River Canal near the village of El Portal. Her mother had reported her missing – to the police, the state attorney and the medical examiner – yet authorities failed to put two and two together to identify the girl in the morgue, known then as Jane Doe, for a full 14 days.

Gina was at the center of a sex trafficking case involving a prominent 67-year-old Miami Beach doctor she’d met on Tinder. Gina, then 17, and a friend, who was 16, were discovered by Miami Beach police hiding in the closet of Dr. Jeffrey Kamlet’s oceanfront condo in April 2022.

Kamlet, an addiction doctor, was no stranger to Miami Beach police.

“At the police station they told me he is wanted for having sex with minors, like, he had a record of it, like he’s done this to multiple people,” Gina said in a subsequent interview with a state attorney investigator.

But Miami Beach police closed the case two months later – without ever formally interviewing Gina or her friend. Several more months passed before an investigator with the state attorney’s office contacted Gina – and she revealed that Kamlet had handcuffed her to a bed and that they had had sex on two separate occasions, court records show.

It would be almost a year before Kamlet was arrested and investigators got search warrants for his condo – seizing a cache of drugs, high-powered assault weapons, handcuffs, sex toys and nearly $100,000 in cash.

Gina’s story is a horrifying study in how police, prosecutors and judges fail to protect troubled kids who are lured into drugs and prostitution, treating them as juvenile delinquents – and even criminals – instead of protecting them and punishing the suspects accused of preying upon them.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle has long promoted her efforts to combat human trafficking in South Florida, one of the top areas in the nation where the crime flourishes. Yet an investigation by the Miami Herald shows that her office dragged their feet on Gina’s case, made multiple mistakes and, even as questions emerge about Kamlet’s past – and his whereabouts when Gina disappeared – there is no indication her death is being investigated.

Nearly all charges against Kamlet were dropped. Kamlet is now facing federal narcotics charges, and Kamlet remains free on bond.

In a September phone interview with the Herald, Kamlet said he did nothing illegal and denied that anything sexual happened with the girls.

“I am absolutely not guilty,” he said, adding that the “two young ladies” had “made a plan to entrap a rich man.”

To this day, no one has interviewed Gina’s parents, who are divorced. Her stepfather didn’t even know she was the alleged victim in a sex trafficking case – even though she was a minor and had been living with him off and on before her death. He recalled that she was in fear of her life before she died, but she didn’t explain why.

“She said ‘dad they are going to kill me,’” he recalled. “I told her to stop going out and stay home but she didn’t listen.”

The medical examiner has ruled Gina’s cause of death “undetermined. “

Her mother said she could not get a copy of her daughter’s autopsy report, and had to beg the medical examiner to explain his ruling.

“He told me that she had drugs [in her system] he had never seen before and that was being investigated,” she said.

Finally on Dec. 4, after the Herald pressured the county, the autopsy was released, showing that Gina had unknown quantities of several drugs, including fentanyl and cocaine, in her system.

But the cause of death is not listed as an overdose. Nor did she drown.

Gina’s death remains a mystery on two fronts: how she died – and why the state attorney isn’t pushing for a thorough investigation into her death. Fernandez Rundle has refused to discuss the sex trafficking case, even though it’s been closed since June, court documents show.

Gina’s mother decided she would try to find out what happened to Gina on her own. She drove to El Portal, and sat by the canal where Gina had been found.

“I saw all the pieces of trash flow by me in the water,” she recalled. “I realized this is how my child left the world. This is how she was disposed of – like a piece of trash.

“All I know is she didn’t put herself in that canal.”

The psychedelic doctor

Ironically, Kamlet could have been just the person to help Gina.

A former president of the Florida Association of Addiction Medicine, Kamlet was an addictionologist who specialized in drug withdrawal.

He began his career in the weight loss business in South Florida in the 1990s, then in 2000, opened a practice specializing in pain management, addiction and bariatric medicine. By the late 2000s, he had taken up alternative medicine, promoting the use of psychedelics to ease drug addiction.

He also ran a concierge-based wellness practice catering to some of Miami’s most powerful people: professional athletes, entertainment moguls, the owner of a professional sports team, Russian millionaires, actors — and drug-addicted sons and daughters.

For two decades, Kamlet was a fixture in Miami’s social scene, attending charity balls and fundraising events with government leaders and celebrities.

At the many addiction and alternative medicine conferences he spoke at, organizers boasted he had a resume with degrees in medicine and surgery from the State University of New York – even though his Florida medical license showed he earned his M.D. from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico. He has said he has certifications in six different medical specialties and was a professor at the University of Miami, although the university has no record of him teaching there.

One of Kamlet’s primary methods of doing business was cash. In court documents, he called his clients “VIP uber important rich people.” Some of those services, costing over $10,000 a year, included administering ketamine, pain medications and addiction treatment to clients whom he claimed “were treated for sensitive issues and wanted no paper trail.”

One of those clients, contacted by the Herald, said Kamlet administered ketamine treatments to help him cope with his depression. Another – a wealthy businessman – said he paid $12,000 a year for his family’s medical check-ups.

“I have told patients for issues they want to keep private to just state that payment was for private concierge medical visits,” Kamlet wrote in a memo to his attorneys contained in the court file.

By 2022, the façade he had created as a professional Dr. Feelgood offering house calls to rich people was beginning to crumble.

A recovering heroin addict himself, Kamlet claimed in videos on YouTube that he had been a “functioning addict” for years while working as an emergency room doctor in South Florida. He said he has been clean for over a decade, but those who know him say his latest arrest and the drugs and weapons found in his apartment – coupled with a history of police calls to his home – are all red flags that something was amiss.

Bernd Wollschlaeger, current president of the Florida Society of Addiction Medicine, said it’s highly unusual for doctors to be paid in large amounts of cash.

“This is kind of a mobster collection of transactions,” said Wollschlaeger, who knows Kamlet, upon reviewing his list of client transactions. “This is not normal behavior, these aren’t normal kinds of transactions between a physician and his patients.”

Over the past decade, Kamlet’s primary quest was promoting hallucinogenics to cure opioid addiction. He advocated for legalization of ibogaine, a controversial psychedelic drug therapy treatment that has shown promise in other countries, but is banned in the U.S. because of potential heart complications.

He served as a medical consultant at a luxury drug treatment spa in Mexico where he supervised ibogaine and other treatments that cost upwards of $20,000 per visit. At least one of those treatments at the clinic led to the death of a 49-year-old man in 2023, Rolling Stone magazine reported in August.

Kamlet insists he’s never exaggerated his credentials, claiming that the people promoting his appearances were responsible for any errors in his resume.

“I am one of the most renowned addictionologists in the world,” he said. “I don’t tell them what to write.”

He encouraged the Herald to talk to some of the people whom he has helped over the years, but patients contacted did not want to speak about him on the record.

One of his longtime friends, British-American actress and filmmaker Gabrielle Anwar, told the Herald that Kamlet’s recent arrest makes him a victim of what she called “cancel culture.” Anwar, who is married to Shareef Malnik, owner of the iconic restaurant The Forge, was asked to elaborate what she meant.

“Well, they were drug addicts and prostitutes trying to make a buck.”

The Tinder Connection

Gina had been rebellious from the time she was 14. She lived in a comfortable suburb west of Fort Lauderdale in Broward County, with A-rated schools, safe streets and an abundance of parks and recreation programs. But Gina didn’t make many friends, and by the time she was in middle school she was meeting people on the internet instead — the kind of acquaintances who didn’t ask how old she was, what she was doing or where she was going.

Gina began using the drug “Molly,” or ecstasy – a lot. Her mother, divorced and working a full-time job with two younger children at home, tried to steer her toward getting her GED and doing something useful with her life. But by her 16th birthday, her mother had gone to court to have her committed to a residential drug treatment facility. Gina had been Baker-Acted, or committed to a psychiatric facility, several times. She also overdosed at least once.

Still, even on her darkest days, in the middle of the night, Gina would call or text her mother.

Until April 27, 2022, when Gina didn’t text or call or come home.

That was the night she met Kamlet.

Gina had just turned 17 when she connected with Kamlet on Tinder. His profile featured a photo of him standing in the woods wearing a black leather jacket, according to court records. His long salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back. Another photo partially showed Kamlet behind the wheel of his black Corvette convertible.

Gina and her 16-year-old friend Tara started the Tinder account together. Phone records show that Kamlet and Gina spoke several times that month. Gina later told investigators that he offered her $600 to have sex with him – so that night, Gina got a ride to Kamlet’s oceanfront condo in Miami Beach. She texted Tara to meet her there.

The first thing that Gina noticed in Kamlet’s apartment were the wads of cash – piles of it — strewn across the table. Kamlet went into a cabinet and pulled out a bag of powder, then a razor blade and a straw, his arrest affidavit shows. Gina told authorities that Kamlet claimed it was pure cocaine from Colombia – and that he kept a lot of it on hand because he would put it out during parties for guests. He instructed her how to snort it, the records show. Afterward, he gave her a tour of his condo and showed her a safe in his bedroom filled with bottles of pills and an array of high-powered weapons.

“He had every milligram of [oxycontin] in every color,” Gina later told the state attorney’s investigator, Francisco “Frank” Casanovas. “Then he took out some crazy ass guns. I have never seen so much drugs and cash and guns in my life.”

After snorting the coke, Gina was told to remove her clothes and get into his bed. She was hesitant, and her legs were shaking, she told Casanovas. Kamlet handcuffed her wrists and her legs to the bed posts, and they had unprotected sex, she told Casanovas in a recorded interview.

Afterward, Kamlet uncuffed her and gave her a pair of his gray men’s cotton boxer shorts to wear because she was menstruating, the report said.

He paid her $600 in cash and then gave her more cocaine, she told the investigator. She admitted she was traumatized by the ordeal, and couldn’t get it out of her head.

Tara arrived and both girls talked to Kamlet about living with him. He was agreeable, but got nervous when the driver who had brought Gina to his condo kept texting her that night. Kamlet told Gina that if she wanted to live with him, she would have to get rid of her driver, whom he assumed was her “pimp.’’

He told her that if she had any trouble, Kamlet would find some guys to “take care” of him, court records show.

It was 1 a.m. when they heard police banging on the door. The girls’ parents had reported them missing and police tracked them using the GPS on one of their phones.

The doctor answered, and immediately invited police inside, telling them that the girls were there.

Disheveled, wearing a wrinkled white t-shirt, his hair in a ponytail, Kamlet walked around his apartment calling out for the girls, who were nowhere to be found. Finally, he opened a hall closet where they were hiding amid hanging clothes.

“Come out of there, you’re in trouble,” Kamlet told them.

“I was trying to help them...Trying to be the hero here,” he told police, explaining that he had met them on Tinder.

“How old are they?” a police officer asked.

“18 – they had IDs,” Kamlet said.

The girls gave police false names and birth dates – and they had no IDs, according to the police report.

“Let’s just cut the bullshit,” a female Miami Beach police officer told the girls. “We’re trying to figure out why we’re here, because honestly I don’t know why we are here.”

The girls were quiet. Gina appeared to wipe tears from her eyes.

Kamlet, in an adjoining room, was listening, and said “Girls, tell them the truth, tell them the story you told me, that’s the one I know, don’t get me in trouble for any of your bullshit. All I was trying to do was help you.”

Silence.

Kamlet turned to a male officer standing near him.

“They told me they were living in this guy’s house who carries a gun with him and selling them drugs,” Kamlet said.

The girls, however, told the police this wasn’t true. They said they were fighting with their parents and had simply run away from home.

From his seat in the living room, Kamlet kept talking, though he wasn’t being asked any questions. On police bodycam video reviewed by the Herald, he told an officer that he had only planned to let them spend the night. He added that he also thought he could help them get free drug treatment because he was an addiction doctor.

“And your Tinder profile says you’re a rehab doctor?” the officer asked.

Kamlet was quiet for a bit, and music could be heard playing loudly in the background. It was David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” – a version from the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the 2013 film about an ordinary man, played by Ben Stiller, who harbors delusions of heroism.

“Do you know Sgt. Motola, who just retired?” Kamlet suddenly asked, referring to Jeffrey Motola, a former Miami Beach police sergeant. “He’s a good friend of mine. If you call him, he will tell you I’m a good guy.”

The officer was quiet.

“Nothing sexual went on here by the way,” Kamlet volunteered. “I’m an addiction doctor here on the beach, and I have pity for these ‘kinds’ that tell me they are being held hostage and are on drugs.”

Kamlet continued: “I used to be a New York State police surgeon. I used to go on calls, and we would find these girls handcuffed to beds and stuff like that.”

Finally, two more officers arrived. The girls were told to pack up their belongings. The police body cameras show officers handcuffing the girls. They were escorted out of Kamlet’s luxury apartment building, their hands cuffed behind their backs.

The bodycam footage showed that the only other questions police asked Kamlet was his name, phone number and email address.

Victor Williams, vice chair for the Miami-Dade County Human Trafficking Coalition, reviewed portions of the police bodycam footage and found aspects of it disturbing. While he said police departments have different policies, the girls should have been immediately separated from Kamlet and talked to individually.

“You don’t question someone in front of someone who potentially violated [them],” Williams said, adding that Kamlet should have been questioned.

Police should have called the Florida Department of Children and Families as soon as they learned the girls were minors.

“I don’t know if they could’ve saved her life,” he said. “But they could’ve done better.”

‘I really want to meet you’

The girls’ parents came to pick them up at the police station before dawn that morning.

“Was he detained?” Tara’s mother asked a police officer about Kamlet.

The officer replied, “No.”

She asked about whether they took her daughter to get tested for rape, but the officer shook her head and suggested she take her daughter herself.

Tara’s mother said no one ever followed up on the case and police failed to return her phone calls. Miami Beach police closed the case on May 23, 2023. The report noted “no allegations of criminal activity was made by either party at the scene.”

“The police wanted nothing to do with this case,” Tara’s mother recalled. “They didn’t do anything.”

Frustrated, Tara’s mother wrote Fernandez Rundle, the Miami-Dade State Attorney.

“My 16-year-old daughter and another underaged teenager were found at the home of Jeffrey Kamlet MD by Miami Beach Police Department,” she wrote.

“It is my impression that Miami-Dade County may have another Jeffrey Epstein scenario,’’ she said, referring to the Palm Beach sex trafficker who abused high school girls in Palm Beach in the 2000s. “I am requesting that your team look into this individual for he meets young underaged girls at the beach and lures them with prescription drugs…”

Miami Beach Police Chief Wayne A. Jones declined to comment. A spokesman for the chief later told the Herald the department had opened an internal affairs probe into the matter and would not answer any questions.

Gina’s mother believes police never treated the case seriously because they considered her daughter a prostitute.

“Gina was a kid,” her mother said. “No matter what life choices she made, she was still a child. You aren’t mature at that age. You believe anything that a man says, especially when they are offering money and drugs.”

Even after Kamlet’s brush with police, he continued to communicate with Gina over the following weeks, state attorney records show. Gina later told authorities that she and Kamlet would use a secure app on their phones, and some of those conversations weren’t saved. But Gina had taken screenshots of some of their texts. A couple of them appeared in the court file.

“I really want to meet you,” Kamlet texted the 17-year-old sometime in late June or early July 2022. “And yes, if you can be off drugs we can own the world.”

Gina told Kamlet that she was going to rehab but she said she would stay in touch. He replied that he too had been in rehab, according to his arrest affidavit.

In July, Kamlet picked Gina up in Miami Beach and took her to his condo, court records show. Gina captured a partial selfie in his black Corvette which she posted on social media. Once at this condo, Kamlet showed her some bondage porn on video and told her he could get her into pornography, and she could make a lot of money, according to the affidavit. The two had sex again, records show, and Kamlet paid Gina $400 – $200 less than what he had agreed because, she said, he was angry she wouldn’t let him perform oral sex on her.

“I would tell my friends about him – and about the guns and the drugs,” she told Casanovas. “I would tell them he has to do something more than just be a doctor cause why would a doctor have machine guns and a $20 million gun collection in a condo?”

The secret life of Jeffrey Kamlet

Kamlet, now 69, had a history with Miami Beach police, who were summoned to his beachfront condo on dozens of occasions: to take reports about his own runaway teenage daughter; to investigate multiple burglaries and thefts; and to respond to incidents involving women who were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Kamlet had his mug shot taken three other times when he was jailed by the Miami-Dade Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2008 and 2009. But Kamlet seems to have no prior arrest record, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The Herald submitted public records requests to FDLE in August in an effort to understand why Kamlet had mug shots but no criminal record. The agency has yet to fulfill the request, and multiple phone calls and emails – including a letter to FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass – went unanswered.

The Herald reviewed dozens of incident reports involving Miami Beach police calls to his condo over the past two decades. Several of them stand out.

In 2011, police were called to Kamlet’s condo at 3 a.m. Kamlet told them that he had been having rough sex with a 23-year-old college student who fell off the bed into a glass table, severing her finger. She had already been transported to the hospital by the time police arrived — but Kamlet had found her finger and handed it to police. Police took the finger to the hospital and spoke to the woman, who confirmed Kamlet’s story. They noted that she was noticeably inebriated. Doctors were unable to reattach her finger.

In 2021, Kamlet called Miami Beach police to report that he was receiving death threats. Someone was calling his home and his office, and sending him bloody photographs of people with their throats slit.

“You should not have messed with the cartel,” a male voice said in one call featuring macabre music in the background. According to the police report, the caller threatened to kill him and rape his ex-wife and daughters. Police investigated, and even sought the help of the FBI, but they couldn’t trace the phone numbers and concluded it was a scam.

Miami Beach police records show they were called to Kamlet’s apartment in 2009 to investigate an incident involving Margo Kenyon, a former porn star who suffered from drug addiction. The report, obtained from Miami Beach police by the Herald, is blank.

Kenyon’s daughter, Elisha McClanahan, said her mother had been high, running naked in the street, and was picked up by police and taken to the hospital. She later told her daughter that Kamlet had taken care of it with the police.

“He was a part of that whole South Beach social scene – he knew a lot of people and took her to nice places,” McClanahan said. “She told me he had it wiped clean.”

By 2010, Kenyon was no longer with Kamlet. She was deep into addiction, homeless and on the street. Kenyon, who also used the last name Lawson, had been arrested more than 100 times before she finally got clean in 2019. The Miami Herald featured her in a story about addiction that year, when she was working to help other addicts get off the streets.

She died in 2020 from a massive heart attack. She was 48.

“She was a broken human being, and he preyed upon broken human beings,” McClanahan said.

There were also police calls about another broken person in Kamlet’s life: his daughter, Gabrielle.

Gabrielle had a history of running away since she was a minor. Like Gina, she had been in and out of rehab. But in 2017, her body was found under a highway overpass in Overtown. Her autopsy report, which was inexplicably included in Kamlet’s sex trafficking court file, concluded she died of an overdose. She was 22.

“Gaby” – as she was called – would disappear into South Beach and sometimes be gone for days, police records show. Her mother, Caren, also filed multiple reports about her daughter over the years.

Gina told Casanovas that Kamlet talked about his daughter and how she died. It wasn’t lost on Gina that she was about the same age as Gaby.

“I thought, OK, this is strange,” Gina told Casanovas. “God, and you’re giving drugs to addicts?”

The arrest

Casanovas was an interesting choice to head up an underage sex trafficking case.

A burly man with a large gray beard, Casanovas, 60, clearly knew how intimidating he appeared to two teenage girls he had to coax into talking about drugs and sexual assault.

“I know I don’t look like the most warm and friendly guy to talk to,” Casanovas said in an interview with Tara.

Casanovas spent most of his 40-year police career as an undercover narcotics detective, working with drug dealers. He later moved to internal affairs, a job in which he was assigned to investigate bad cops. But in 2001, three Miami police officers accused Casanovas of threatening them because they were testifying against three of his friends, who were accused of police corruption. He was also sued by a former Hooters waitress for false arrest after he allegedly roughed her up when she complained that a fellow officer had inappropriately fondled her.

Casanovas denied all wrongdoing.

At least seven times, he was placed on a special list compiled to weed out and flag problem police officers, the Miami Herald reported in a 1997 investigation on undercover police. The story in part focused on weak oversight by the state attorney – Fernandez Rundle – who was criticized for the high number of wrongful police shootings and other misconduct by undercover officers.

At the time, she downplayed the problem, saying that citizen complaints are often bogus or impossible to prove.

Despite Casanovas’ history, he was hired in July 2021 as an investigator for Fernandez Rundle’s Human Trafficking Task Force.

Casanovas conducted both interviews with the girls. Portions of the interviews are graphic. At one point, as Gina was describing sex with Kamlet, Casanovas asked her whether she had had a climax.

Initially, however, Casanovas appeared to do his due diligence in the case. He obtained subpoenas for phone records confirming Kamlet had been in contact with Gina, and he recovered copies of the texts they exchanged, the photographs that Gina had, as well as the boxer shorts he’d given her.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, Casanovas did with the case from November 2022 until Kamlet’s arrest in March 2023, when he finally obtained a search warrant.

On March 9, 2023, Casanovas, accompanied by officers with the Miami Beach police, arrested Kamlet at his condo. Bodycam footage shows Kamlet a bit confused as he is handcuffed. Casanovas repeatedly tells him to “focus.”

At one point, Casanovas allowed Kamlet to take some Xanax, the bodycam video showed. Casanovas tells Kamlet to call him “Frank.”

Kamlet is instructed to remove his jewelry because he was being taken to jail, and he seemed dazed, mentioning he had never been to jail before.

“You’ve been arrested before,” Casanovas reminded him. “For cocaine, back in the day.”

There is no record of that cocaine arrest.

Kamlet was booked into the Miami-Dade County jail.

The next day, state prosecutor Brenda Mezick asked that Kamlet be held without bail given the seriousness of the alleged crime – sex with a minor. The age of consent in Florida is 18.

But Kamlet’s lawyers argued that charging Kamlet with trafficking was a stretch. Circuit Court Judge Mindy Glazer was also skeptical.

Casanovas’ affidavits were another problem. The information was not consistent, and one of them left out two critical pages listing the ages of the victims.

Kamlet’s attorney, Jayne Weintraub, pounced on the incompleteness of the affidavits. She also pointed out that as a former prosecutor herself, it was overreach for the state attorney to charge her client under the state’s human trafficking statute.

“Judge, they met on Tinder, this is Tinder, this was a negotiated deal, this was not transporting minors across the border, securing them and forcing them to have sex – that’s what this [law] is intended for,” Weintraub said.

“And by the way, judge, this was a year ago, I mean if he was such a danger to the community then why didn’t they do this a year ago?”

Mezick, the chief of the human trafficking task force, took issue with Weintraub and the judge referring to the victim as a prostitute, noting that as a minor, the girl was below the age of consent.

Glazer acknowledged the victims were children, but nevertheless didn’t believe there was enough evidence to hold Kamlet. She released him on $92,500 bond, and placed him on house arrest, with an ankle monitor. He was directed to remain at home – except to go to work, to the grocery store and to his religious institution. He also surrendered his passport.

The ankle monitor records show that the county’s Corrections and Rehabilitation Department – which was responsible for keeping tabs on Kamlet – often had difficulty pinpointing his location, saying he was “drifting” – a term they used to explain the difficulty of knowing his precise location since he lived by a large body of water.

Gina turned 18 on March 8, the same week Kamlet was arrested. She had just returned home from spending four months at a treatment facility on the west coast of Florida.

Her mother feared for her safety, and wanted her to step away from the criminal case. But Gina was stubborn. She wanted to cooperate with the prosecution, her mother said.

“I said to her, ‘don’t do it,’ don’t say anything to them, our lives are in jeopardy here by talking to the police about someone like him…I told her that people with money and power don’t get in trouble, ” she said.

“She was like, ‘he’s going to get what he deserves.’”

A new tip

Gina was last seen alive on June 4, 2023 at 10 p.m. Her body was found four days later.

Kamlet’s ankle monitor sent an alert to the county’s Department of Corrections, on June 6, at 11 p.m. The alert notes that Kamlet was contacted and stated that he was home. But officers were nevertheless dispatched to Kamlet’s condo to “troubleshoot.”

The Miami-Dade corrections department said it had no detailed report about the visit on June 6.

Detectives from Miami-Dade police homicide delivered the news to Gina’s mother 14 days after Gina’s body was found. They implied that Gina had died of an overdose and somehow had fallen into the canal – a story that seemed far-fetched to her mother.

As the weeks turned to months, and the medical examiner and detectives stopped returning her calls, Gina’s mother began showing up at their offices in person.

One time, she brought the detective photographs of Gina with her brother and sister.

“I wanted to show them that she was not just a decomposed dead body in a canal. She was not just a girl that you think was a prostitute and drug addict. She was a young, manipulated low self-esteem girl, who unfortunately came into the path of a very bad person.”

Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned forensic pathologist who reviewed Gina’s autopsy for the Herald, said the report only shows the kinds of drugs found in Gina’s body– not the quantities. Even so, fentanyl was in her system, and just two milligrams can be fatal.

“When the medical examiner says ‘undetermined’ the police will often do nothing,” Baden said. “But given the history and what was going on, this clearly deserves a full investigation.”

Baden, who has conducted or reviewed autopsies in countless deaths, including Epstein’s – said there was no water in her lungs or stomach, so it appears she was likely dead when she was placed in the water.

Wollschlaeger, the addiction doctor, pointed out that other drugs in her system, such as cocaine, can be contaminated by fentanyl – in which case it’s quite possible that her death was a homicide.

“This poor girl that died didn’t die voluntarily, maybe she was murdered with the injection of drugs. Cocaine is not a cheap drug and she could have been fed drugs for sex, who knows?”

With no answers, Gina’s mother began investigating on her own.

She soon discovered a Miami Beach police report from June 4, 2023 – the last day she heard from Gina. Turns out, Miami Beach police had seen Gina about 10 p.m. that evening with a homeless man named Edmund Cody.

She turned the report over to Kevin Font, the Miami-Dade homicide detective in charge of Gina’s case. But he said he couldn’t find Cody. So Gina’s mother did, showing Font a record that Cody had been arrested. Finally, Cody was located and questioned. But he couldn’t help detectives, Font told Gina’s mother.

“I embarrassed the detective,” Gina’s mother said. “I called them out saying, ‘you see, the guy was arrested three times?’ I go, ‘I’m just a civilian and I found all this shit out.’ I literally embarrassed them that they didn’t do their job.”

Miami-Dade Homicide declined to comment for this story. They said the case is still open.

Casanovas, the prime investigator, resigned from the state attorney’s office on May 10, 2023 – two months after arresting Kamlet at his Green Diamond condo.

He is now working for the City of West Miami Police Department. No reason was given for his departure. The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Casanovas.

On March 21 of this year, nearly all the charges against Kamlet were dropped. As part of a deal, he pleaded guilty to interference with the custody of a minor and was released. He voluntarily surrendered his medical license.

The Florida Department of Health, which regulates medical licenses and doctors, said it had no founded complaints against Kamlet. However, the agency is exempted from releasing information about complaints that are closed as unfounded.

Kamlet’s guns, including a silencer, were returned to him, according to the court file.

His computers, however, were turned over to the FBI. On July 3, 2024, Kamlet was indicted on federal narcotics charges. The indictment alleged he was illegally selling a spectrum of drugs including ibogaine, oxycodone, morphine and ketamine. He was released after posting a $100,000 bond.

Last week, Kamlet’s attorneys presented the government with a 28-page draft motion to suppress the search, with prosecutors acknowledging that the motion presents “significant legal and factual issues” that have to be examined.

Prosecutors have to respond to the motion by Jan. 16. Sources say it’s likely the federal charges against Kamlet will be dropped.

Kamlet’s attorney, Jayne Weintraub, did not respond to multiple requests for comment -- including on a recent letter sent to the state attorney by a potential new witness.

In October 2024, Tara’s mother told the Herald that Casanovas had mentioned to her that his office had received another tip about Kamlet. That letter, sent to Fernandez Rundle, was only turned over to the Herald after a separate public records request.

“Thank you for finally attempting to bring Dr. Jeffrey Kamlet to justice. This man has been a predator in Miami Beach for as long as I have known the family…I was friends with his adopted daughter Gaby who unfortunately passed away from a drug overdose in 2017. Her father, Dr. Kamlet, supplied us with oxycontin and Xanax and we often stayed overnight at his condo in the Green Diamond. I can still remember the condo in detail and now it brings chills to think about,” she wrote.

At the time, she was 17 or 18 – and Gaby was about 16, she said.

“I was in the trenches of drug addiction as well as his daughter, but thankfully I was able to turn my life around, get clean and make an amazing life for myself.”

The woman, whom the Herald is not naming to protect her privacy, offered to speak to the state prosecutor about Kamlet.

The state attorney’s office has no record that the woman was ever interviewed.

About this series

Read more about how Miami Herald fought to report this story here.

Credits

Julie K. Brown | Reporter

Grethel Aguila | Reporter

Claire Healy | Reporter

Ana Claudia Chacin | Reporter

David Smiley | Editor

Trish Wilson Belli | Editor

Al Diaz | Photographer

Rachel Handley | Visual Journalist

Sohail Al-Jamea | Creative Director

Susan Merriam | Development & Design