CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – A mother in Clarksville is finally seeing justice for her son’s 2014 murder. Shaquille D. Miles was arrested this morning by the Clarksville Police Department and charged for the shooting death of 24-year-old Fran “Frankie” Daniel Caratini.
Miles was charged with criminal homicide, and booked into the Montgomery County Jail.
Frankie, a father of two young children at the time, was found dead on Aug. 14, 2014 off Chapel Street in the New Providence area of Clarksville. The case had essentially gone cold, as all leads fizzled out.
When the original detective on the case, Detective Chris Nolder, left the homicide unit, Detective Keenan Carlton was assigned to cracking the murder. Det. Carlton was able to further develop pre-existing leads according to a press release from CPD, which lead to Miles’s arrest.
The family reacts
“I’m happy that it’s done, and it’s over. … Six years. When they told me I didn’t know what to do,” Frankie’s mother, Carmen Rivera Caratini, told Clarksville Now.
Caratini was called down to the police station this morning, where CPD homicide detectives informed her they had enough proof to arrest the man who was suspected of shooting and killing her son.
“When I came out of (the station), the detective told me ‘Okay Ms. Carmen, you can go,’ and I said, ‘No, I want to stay for when he comes out,” Carmen said. “So they made me go far, far away. I got in my car and one detective was at each door, and I saw him. He saw my face.”
When asked how that made her feel, Carmen said, “Anger. At the same time, he’s a child, you know? He’s just a child that did something stupid, but he has to pay for what he did,” she said through tears. “I forgive him, but he has to pay for what he did.”
“It’s a relief, but at the same time, the detective told me that in two weeks it’s not over because then we have to go to court,” Carmen said.
Whether or not the trial will begin that soon is a decision that will be made at Miles’s arraignment, which has not been set yet. But for Carmen, there’s a lot more on the line than just getting justice for her son.
Time for justice
“I went to the doctor about seven months ago, maybe a year, and I told her that I felt something on the back of my leg, like a cyst, and she always kept blowing me off, blowing me off,” Carmen said.
Now, the cyst is larger and requires surgery because on most recent MRI, doctors told her it looked like cancer. If the trial starts soon, she says she may decide to postpone the surgery until after the Miles’s trial, due to the serious risks posed by the location of the cyst.
“The cyst is attached to the artery, so I don’t know how I am going to do that. So I said, ‘God, I don’t want to die before.’ But I can die now,” Carmen said with a laugh.
Before she left the station, Carmen tells Clarksville Now she took a photo with the detectives who solved her son’s murder. “It’s been six years, but to me, it was yesterday. … I loved him so much, he was my baby and will always be a part of me,” Carmen said.
Detectives from CPD were asked for comment, but did not have anything additional to add to what was shared in the news release today.
According to CPD, more arrests are possible in this case. Anyone with additional information is asked to contact Detective Carlton at (931) 648-0656 ext. 5172, the Tipsline, which can be reached at (931) 645-8477, or go online and submit a tip anonymously at P3tips.com/591.