MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Photos released by Miami Beach police show what a luxury hotel room looked like when officers found former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum drunk and with two other men.
The photos released Wednesday show vomit-stained and rumpled bed sheets, a box for a party light disco ball, spilled white pills on the carpet and a vial of a drug often used for erectile dysfunction. But the newly released photos and officer body-cam video shed no further light on what Gillum was doing or why he was there last month.
Fire rescue crews and officers were called to the Miami Beach hotel March 13 for a suspected drug overdose. Police say Gillum and two other men were in the hotel room and Gillum was inebriated.
Police say one of the men, Aldo Mejias, had given his credit card to Travis Dyson, 30, to rent a room at the hotel and planned to meet up with him later. When Mejias came to the hotel room, he found Gillum vomiting in the bathroom and Dyson began vomiting and collapsed on the bed, according to a police report.
When officers arrived, Gillum was so inebriated he could not communicate. Gillum had stable medical signs when medics returned for a welfare check and he left the hotel. Dyson was taken to a hospital, according to the police report.
Authorities found baggies of suspected crystal methamphetamine, according to the report.
Gillum said last month that he was in Miami Beach for a wedding and did not use illegal drugs. After the hotel room encounter became public, Gillum announced he was entering a rehabilitation facility, saying he had fallen into a depression and alcohol abuse after losing his bid for governor.
Gillum, 40, was the first black nominee in a major political party to run for governor in Florida. He lost narrowly to Republican Ron DeSantis in the 2018 election. After the electoral defeat, Gillum mounted an effort to register Democratic voters in Florida and frequently appeared on cable news channels as a political commentator.
The former Tallahassee mayor is married to a woman and has three children. Representatives for Gillum didn’t return email inquiries, and Gillum did not answer his cellphone Thursday.
The information released this week by the Miami Beach Police Department included a 911 call and video from an officer’s body camera that is mostly muted and blurred out. Before the frame goes blurry and silent, the footage shows officers in a hallway knocking on the hotel room door. Someone inside can be heard saying, “Drugs.”
The blurred video appears to show a naked black man talking to officers inside the room. The 911 call mostly captures a dispatcher instructing Mejias how to perform chest compressions on Dyson.
Public records show Dyson has been a registered nurse for the past two years, but he voluntarily withdrew his license recently. The Miami Herald has reported that he previously went by the alias Brodie Scott on a website for male escorts. No one answered a call on Thursday to a cellphone number that a records search shows belongs to Dyson.
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Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, contributed to this report.
