Fighting Fear In Florida

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.

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.