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- <text id=93TT1470>
- <title>
- Apr. 19, 1993: Fighting Fear In Florida
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Apr. 19, 1993 Los Angeles
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 22
- SOCIETY
- Fighting Fear In Florida
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>The brutal murder of a tourist alarms foreign visitors--and
- locals as well
- </p>
- <p> Die Todesfalle Unter Palmen! Screamed the german tabloid.
- deathtrap under the palms! In the language of Florida tourism,
- that had worrisome further meanings: shame and financial peril.
- After Berlin special-education teacher Barbara Meller Jensen
- strayed off I-95 near Miami and was brutally murdered in front
- of her children in a "bump-and-run" robbery, German Consul
- General Klaus Sommer considered warning other Germans away from
- the city. Jensen was the sixth foreign (and third German)
- tourist killed in Florida since December.
- </p>
- <p> Sommer's was no small threat. Tourists bring $28 billion
- a year into the state, and half of Miami's tourists are
- foreigners. City boosters, who do not want Miami listed with
- current travel-agency pariahs like Egypt and Northern Ireland,
- announced improved highway signs and street lighting and faster
- phasing out of specially marked rental-car license plates that
- say "easy prey" to thugs. After meeting with Governor Lawton
- Chiles, Sommer decided to forgo his travel advisory. Two
- suspects were named in Jensen's murder. Her widower Christian
- seemed glad of this, but noted that in Germany, normally, "when
- two cars bump, you have to get out." That used to be normal in
- Florida too.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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