The Cursed Shell of Parkway Regional Hospital: A Haunted Ruin That Refused to Die
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In the shadow of North Miami’s Cloverleaf Interchange—where the Palmetto Expressway merges onto I-95—a decaying, graffiti-covered skeleton loomed over rushing traffic for more than two decades. Parkway Regional Hospital once stood as a place of healing. Instead, it became a breeding ground for tragedy, violence, and something far darker that refused to leave even after the walls came down.
The hospital opened in 1974 with 300 beds. A locked psych ward occupied the entire seventh floor, complete with its own separate entrance for patients involuntarily committed under the Baker Act. A morgue waited in the basement. As the surrounding neighborhood descended into crime and decay, the hospital closed its doors for good in 2002. What remained was an empty, rotting carcass that locals swore the living never truly occupied alone.
The Murder That Sealed Its Fate
On December 3, 1998, psychiatric patient Knollys Sterling ended any illusion of safety inside those walls. The 68-year-old Jamaican man confronted Dr. Christina Gabriele Smith near the nurses’ station on the psych floor. He demanded to know why she refused to release him so he could care for his dog and salvage his failing ice cream vending business.
When Dr. Smith calmly explained he needed to remain for five days of treatment, Sterling erupted. He stormed back to his room, retrieved a .380 handgun he had smuggled inside a manual typewriter case two days earlier, and opened fire. One bullet struck the doctor in the chest, piercing her heart. She died an hour later.
Sterling then turned the gun on others, wounding James Reed, who had been leading a Narcotics Anonymous meeting on the same floor. Another man wrestled Sterling into a bear hug until Officer Christopher Starnes arrived and handcuffed the killer. Witnesses heard Sterling scream, “I told you… that I’m a person. That I’m somebody.”
Authorities later discovered how a Baker Act patient obtained a firearm: hospital staff failed to search him properly after he returned from a supervised visit to his foreclosed home. No metal detectors protected the facility.
A Pattern of Death
Sterling’s rampage was not the first sign of rot. Two weeks earlier, another psychiatric patient leaped from a second- or third-floor window and survived with minor injuries. On November 8, 1998, a man jumped to his death from the seventh floor.
Sterling himself carried a long history of violence.
Police records indicated the Jamaican native had a history of violence. In 1978, he was charged with aggravated assault, but the case was dropped, and the details of the event were lost. In 1989, he was picked up on a warrant, and a search of a duffel bag he carried yielded a .25-caliber firearm with 7 rounds in the clip, and one in the chamber. He was sentenced to 2 days in jail.
In 1993, he was charged once more with aggravated assault. The victim was selling snow cones for Sterling, and they argued over money. He punched the woman and then bit her on the nose.
In September, 1996, he was charged with aggravated assault and two counts of attempted murder for firing shots at two boys from the neighborhood who knocked on his door by mistake. He was out on $5,000 bail when he killed Dr. Smith. The case was delayed several times, running into the current year of the crime.
In August, 4 months before the murder, Sterling’s court-appointed attorney told the court his client was not mentally competent to stand trial. In October, Judge Gill Freeman ordered Sterling to go for outpatient psychiatric treatment.
The doctors, after examining him, found that he was worse than the judge had been told, and he needed to be treated at a secure facility; in other words, he needed to be committed rather than an outpatient treatment. In response, Sterling vanished. The judge issued a warrant, but Sterling turned himself in the same day. They diagnosed him as psychotic, paranoid, delusional, and dangerous.
Besides his criminal problems, Sterling needed to come up with $7,000 to halt foreclosure on his house.
According to his attorney, “He blamed everyone for his problems. I was the fourth attorney he used. If he had settled the case two attorneys ago, he could have saved his house, but he didn’t want advice from anyone.”
Yet he slipped through the cracks until the moment he pulled the trigger.
Dr. Smith’s murder triggered a cascade of consequences. The hospital faced probation in 1999 over security failures.
Dr. Smith’s parents sued the hospital for security practices and received an undisclosed settlement in 2003. Soon after, Margaret Borenniman, Smith’s companion of 6 years, a Miami lawyer, filed suit against the estate. She said she should gain control of the estate’s assets or be financially supported by it for the rest of her life due to the relationship between them. However, under Florida’s wrongful death statute, the partner has no claim to it.
Sterling received a 15-year sentence in 2001 (after being deemed competent to stand trial) despite battling colon and prostate cancer. As of 2023, the 92-year-old killer still lived.
Final Nightmares Before Demolition
Even after closure, the building refused to rest quietly. By 2018, obscene graffiti covered its walls—graphic sexual imagery visible to thousands of daily commuters—earning it the nickname “X-rated billboard.” Vagrants, addicts, and fugitives turned the decaying structure into their lair
On March 30, 2019, Noel Chamerrs, 57, was accused of killing his wife, Lorice Harris, and his 10-year-old daughter, Shayla Chambers, with a machete in their Miami Gardens apartment. Harris’ mutilated body was found on the porch, and the child was in her bedroom. Another daughter, Shanalee Chambers, 29, was critically injured in the attack.
Ashley Anderson, Harris’ daughter, confirmed that Harris and Chambers had been married for a decade. Family members also confirmed that Harris had traveled to Jamaica for the wedding and had helped Chambers migrate to the United States. They had noted his behavior had been controlling. Anderson said that Chambers forcing Harris to isolate from other members of her family had caused arguments between her and her mother that had only recently been reconciled.
As of 2026, he’s being held without bond and is pending trial.
Then, in October 2020, 21-year-old Adrian Valenzuela, freshly arrived from California, explored the ruin with friends. He stepped away to make a phone call, walked into a pitch-black stairwell, and plunged hundreds of feet through a gaping hole where stairs once stood. Rescuers found his phone on one floor, his shoes on another, and his body at the bottom.
Demolition crews finally razed the cursed structure in July 2023. Yet those who drove past its former site still feel watched. Some swear the screams of the seventh floor, the chill of the basement morgue, and the final desperate cry of a killer who only wanted to be “somebody” still echo beneath the roaring highway.
The building is gone. The darkness it housed never left.
THE SECURITY GUARD’S STORY (Story from 2011)
A friend of mine was working security there for a short period of time, so some of us went to visit him. He would sit on the 1st floor right next to the morgue.
Keep in mind, the hospital is completely empty except for some equipment. My security guard friend told us stories of how the place was haunted and how he heard weird noises during the night.
One story he spoke of was of a woman who was giving birth, but had to be taken to the O.R. to deliver… the story goes the woman died during the birth, but to this day she still roams around on the second floor in search of her baby.
On two occasions, we roamed the hospital, taking a look around, and let me tell you, the feeling was a scary one. We walked through the O.R. on the second floor, and we walked through the emergency room and cafeteria, and it was freaky.
But the scariest moment happened on my second visit. My friends and I rode the elevators to different floors inside, and we would mess around by trying to leave each other out of the elevator, stuck on the floor. Some floors were lit up, while others were pitch black. We ended up on one floor and got out of the elevator. Can’t remember the floor.
The hallway had a linoleum tile, like in schools. We were about a quarter of the way down the hall when we heard the noise of someone screeching their shoes against the floor as if they were walking. The thing was, no one else was in the hallway but us. The scary part is that the noise kept getting closer as if the person was walking towards us. So we hauled ass and made our way into the stairwell and closed the door behind us. As we made our way down the stairs toward the first floor and exit, we heard the sound enter the stairwell, which sent goosebumps down my spine… I was totally spooked after that incident, and I never returned.
To this day, if you drive by the hospital, different room lights are lit. But it’s impossible, someone is turning on the lights, cause the hospital is empty…So who’s doing it???
Julio, on July 7, 2014, contacted MGC and wrote the following:
My girlfriend and I visited yesterday at about 7 PM. I have to say I didn’t really think it was going to be such a big deal going into this hospital, but the moment you step inside, you know you have to watch your back. We took plenty of video inside, but the video I posted online is about something I’ve never thought we would.