Club Space is denying that one of their bouncers is the man in the sketch wanted in connection with the murder model Paula Sladewski, the Miami New Times is reporting.
"If he were one of our employees the police would have come by to pick him up a long time ago," Space owner Louis Puig told the NT.
Kevin Klym, Sladewski's boyfriend, who was with her at Space the night she disappeared, went on the Today Show Friday and identified the man in the police sketch -- which was release last week -- as the man who was both at the door and escorted Klym out of the club when the couple began to fight.
Instead, Puig insists that club staff saw Sladewski leave with an "Afro-American male," and that the man in the surveillance video is the door man, but that "he is white and has no facial hair and looks nothing like the man on the sketch."
Puig also said that the couple was fighting in the club, a fact Klym denies, and that Klym is simply trying to pass the blame onto someone else because he abandoned his girlfriend.
"Last week he was blaming the City of Miami," Puig told the NT. "Who will he blame next?"
We're not sure on that one, but we do know that Klym was in Miami passing out flyers with the sketch.
Though still a person of interest, neither Sladewski's sister nor brother say they believe Klym murdered their sister.
The couple, in town for New Year's Eve, was at Club Space when they supposedly got in a fight on the dance floor, at which point Klym was escorted out and went back to the hotel. Sladewski stayed. Her body was found in a dumpster 12 miles away from the club later that day.
Though there is video from the club, it is grainy at best, and the camera in the vicinity of where her body was dumped was not rolling. The sketch and the man in it, it seems then, is the police's best hope of getting closer to finding Sladewski's killer.
