TALLAHASSEE – A proposed law named and filed in the honor of a murdered Central Florida student has cleared its first hurdle in the Florida Senate.
The Committee on Community Affairs unanimously approved Senate Bill 898 Tuesday, also known as “Miya’s Law,” which would require landlords of apartments to subject potential employees to background screenings as a condition of employment.
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The law is named after Miya Marcano, whose body was found in October 2021 after she disappeared from the Arden Villas apartments near the University of Central Florida, Orange County deputies said. An employee of the apartment complex, Armando Manuel Caballero, was named the prime suspect in her murder and committed suicide before he could be questioned by authorities.
When Florida Sen. Linda Stewart introduced the bill in November, she said it sought to make tenants feel safer living among apartment complex staff by ensuring workers are properly vetted via background checks of all 50 states.
“They won’t have to worry too much about those things because we are making a law that says this has to happen, so they should feel more confident and safer going into apartment living,” Stewart said.
The measure must pass another committee before moving on to the full State Senate.
Although Stewart called the bill’s performance “perfect” on the Senate side, the Senator said the House version was “gutted” and now lacks key features.
“They took out background checks, they took out having each apartment association log who has access to master keys, they took out the Department of (Business and) Professional Regulation checking every year that these logs are being kept up, I don’t know why they did that,” Stewart said.
Stewart said she was later told these elements were removed due to a House committee chair’s belief that the features constitute overregulation. On the contrary, Stewart said that practices such as mandated national background checks of potential apartment complex employees could have possibly prevented Miya from ever meeting her alleged murderer in the first place.
“You know, what happened to Miya, a background check would have determined that perhaps this person should not have been hired,” Stewart said. “So, we think that this is gutting the bill if you take that out.”
Still, Stewart said she is hopeful that the House version will be gradually amended to ensure all or most of what was removed is returned.
“As it moves through the process we’re hoping more amendments could be placed that it could get it closer to the Senate bill,” Stewart said.