Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the county.
The Best of Marathon awards on Saturday named Sheriff Ramsay as the best elected official.
He said, “It’s an honor. It’s always nice to know that the people appreciate what you’re doing and think you’re doing a good job. So it’s rewarding to know that my efforts are going well or doing good stuff. We are sitting at record low levels of crime. I try to find make myself accessible to our citizens. I’ve kind of been to events county wide, and to get the pulse of the community and hear what they need, what they want, what they demand, what they expect, what they deserve, and try to provide a great level of service. Try to keep making this community one of the best places ever to live, work and play, and so it was an honor to go up against some really great other elected officials. But again, I’m honored, and I appreciate the support and votes from the citizens who think I’m doing a good job.”
On Friday, it was revealed that two sheriff’s office employees with Department of Corrections have been accused of fentanyl related crimes. They are both on administrative leave without pay pending a pre-termination hearing.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We always talk about transparency and how important it is, and this was something where we caught wind of it, and we started the investigation ourselves, which most of the cases where we fire or take action against employees are done within, through internal affairs or criminal investigative divisions. So we police ourselves. We started opening an investigation to what we were understanding to be introduction to contraband into the facility. In this case, fentanyl laced documents. So we started an investigation on two levels, in internal affairs as well as a criminal case with our special operations team. We hope when we start these investigations that the information is wrong and that the persons are not guilty. But these investigations did yield the belief that they were actually introducing narcotics into the facilities, and jeopardizing the safety, well being of the entire facility, of the officers who work there, of the inmates. Fentanyl is one of the most deadly drugs there is, a decent chance you keep doing this, someone dies, overdoses in the jail. So we did do our investigation. We determined probable cause existed. We worked closely with our friends at the State Attorney’s Office. The judge did believe probable cause existed. We did get warrant for these two individuals for bringing narcotics into the facilities. It’s a shame these are people who have put a badge on, sworn up to hold the law, protect, serve the inmate population and their fellow officers, and they just tarnish the badge. Yes, I self report, we do our own press release to put this out. We never tried to hide when something bad occurs. I always tell our listeners, I’ve got almost 600 employees. We handle 277,000 calls for service a year. Not everything is going to go the way we want. The majority of time we’re going to get it right, but when we don’t, I want our listeners to hear from me and hear it from me first. I want them to have confidence knowing that I self police. I hold our people accountable, and I’m not going to tolerate this crap by anybody, especially my team members.”
Late last night there was a fleeing and eluding case.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “About 6:45 coming southbound from Miami Dade County into Monroe, starting at about the 106 mile marker. One of my deputies is behind a vehicle just violating traffic safety laws. We attempted to do a traffic stop about the 106 mile marker on the vehicle, to no avail. The vehicle continued, would not yield to the lights and sirens of a marked patrol car behind them, a second patrol car got involved in the pursuit, a sergeant, so now we had two marked units trying to stop this car, and this went from the 106 mile marker to about the 99 mile marker before the vehicle stopped at the Bungalows parking lot and we did find a 39 year old male from Miami Dade County, who, when asked about seeing us and not stopping, acknowledged hearing and seeing the patrol cars, but made a statement to the fact that he didn’t believe he did anything wrong, so he had no reason to think he should stop. It just doesn’t work that way with law. You don’t know why the officer is stopping you, and when you stop, you’ll find out, but you don’t have an option to not stop legally. And if you don’t stop, you take what is a traffic violation, where you may just get a warning, or, worst case scenario, you get a ticket, and you turn that into you’re going to jail, and your car is being towed because you want to challenge the fact that you don’t believe you did anything wrong. It just doesn’t work that way. We’re lucky we didn’t spike his tires out. They were setting up Stinger spikes, getting ready to spike out his tires when he finally came to stop at the 99. We see these pursuits in other places where they go on or people could hurt. We don’t let them go on because we spike out their cars. We have Stinger spikes in every patrol car, so we can make sure we can set up to stop these pursuits right away. But with one road, it’s kind of hard to flee and get too far away from law enforcement. We have a pretty good success rate here of stopping pretty quickly and safely people who are trying to flee from law enforcement. It’s just a stupid maneuver. It’s thinking with emotion, not logic. The logical thing is, follow state law. You’re required to yield to an emergency vehicle, police, fire, rescue, and you need to stop, pull over and let the officer tell you why he or she is stopping you, and adhere to the laws, rules and regulation like the rest of us.”
An attempted murder charge has been filed against a 61-year-old Key Largo man for attempting to shoot his roommate in the head with a crossbow last week.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This was a two roommates that have been living together for several years, have a history of arguing and not getting along well. So you think one or the other one would move out just to deescalate and get away from it. But they didn’t. They were together, a 61 year old man, I think, a 58 year old male, the 61 year old male is really aggravated and decided he’s going to try to kill his 58 year roommate. So he has a handheld crossbow, and he asked his roommate if he can give him a ride somewhere. The roommate says, sure. The roommate gets in behind the wheel of his car. The suspect gets in the car with him, and then immediately points the crossbow at his head. The driver, in this case victim, sees this and knows that he’s an imminent danger, goes to reach for the crossbow, and as he’s trying to get the crossbow from hitting him in the head, the suspect pulls the trigger. Crossbow goes off, and it grazes the victim in the head. Luckily the fight did move the crossbow slightly away from his head, grazed him in the head, causing minor injuries and bleeding. Then there was a fight for the crossbow. The suspect was trying to get the crossbow, was trying to reload it. At some point in time, this altercation continued in the vehicle and outside the vehicle, the victim, in this case was able to unarm the suspect, get the crossbow, hit the suspect in the head with the crossbow, ultimately on the ground, knocked him out, so the victim knocked out the suspect. Then the victim calls the sheriff’s office to report this crime, we get on scene, we have medical come for the person who’s been struck with the crossbow, as well as the person been knocked out. We got the crossbow on the trunk of a car. We had medical render aid to both individuals. The suspect did regain consciousness, and then was very vocal, argumentative, combative about his roommate and acknowledging he tried to kill him and wants to kill him and thinks he’s a parasite and hates him. Even after we read him Miranda, he continued to acknowledge that he attempted to kill him and wants him dead. So probably not the smartest moves. We had to get the suspect taking the hospital for some medical attention from being beat up by the victim in his case. So that’s karma. Then we brought him in jail, where he’s at, he’s going to remain there. So really sad and stupid to see this. The easy answer was just a move out and go somewhere else. But he took the hard route to think that you’re going to kill your roommate because you don’t like him. So sad and unusual, but definitely with a handheld crossbow, you don’t see that very often.”
A Florida statute that prohibited open carry firearms was struck down recently, however, that does not give complete license to carry in all areas.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We’ve got to get this sorted out with time. Everything is not so clear, a lot of different opinions on where you can and can’t prohibit the carrying of open carry weapons, because most people are taking 790 statutes which apply to carrying concealed weapon licensing, and trying to apply that to this constitutional right. I’m not convinced that all those areas are off limits, but it’s going to come down to, there’s no real guidance right now, and the only way guidance comes down is when some adverse action is taken by law enforcement and somebody sues. So I know for sure the schools have a special carve out in legislation which you can’t have weapons at the school. That’s clear. There’s also a carve out about jails and no weapons are allowed in jails. That’s carved out. There’s also court administrative orders carving out no weapons in the courthouses. Those are the only three that are crystal clear. All the other ones are about as clear as mud because it won’t be determined until someone legally challenges it in a court of law, saying it violates my second amendment, or saying that what you see on 790 has nothing to do with open carry, and that’s yet to be determined. So there are a lot of unanswered questions, which are not that easy. We’ve spoken to the Florida Sheriffs Association, Chiefs Association, a lot of a legal experts, and we’ve got three different opinions. We have to navigate through this. We just hope people will just use some logical common sense. If you’re going to open carry just be respectful of other people. I envision not being the wild wild west. I do envision every now and then someone have an AR15 to try to get people’s attention, or someone who needs a lot of attention, someone who maybe was bullied in school, and this is their chance to go out there and try to think they’re big and bad. I saw an image of Lake County, of a person walking down a park with an AR15 in his hand, pointed to the ground, walking. So that’s what you see. Remember a year and a half ago, in Key West, we had that guy who was carrying a fishing line and a hook with the AR15 walking around Key West because the law already said then you could have a weapon while going to and from hunting or to and from fishing. So he had a piece of fishing line and a hook and said, I’m going fishing. There wasn’t much the law enforcement and city of Key West officers could do, but they’re the ones that you see that are slinging rifles and shotguns and having all these extra magazines and camouflage that are just disrespectful to people, and trying to push the buttons of people, or trying to push the envelope, the average person who may have a holstered weapon on his or her hip, probably isn’t too much of a threat. But there are issues here. Two weeks ago, we saw someone walking down the road with the AR 15, it’d be a crime. We’d have four patrol cars, lights and sirens. We’d have our guns drawn. We’d separate the weapon, and they would go to jail. This week it’s not suspicious. We get a call, we’re probably going to send two cars routine. We’re not going to have guns drawn. We’re not going to throw them on the ground. We’re not going to separate them from the gun, unless we think they’re committing a crime. And in this day and age, active shooters in churches and schools, it’s scary. So it’s going to be interesting. If you see someone walking in front of one of the schools down the road or in front of a church with an AR15 over their shoulder, the first thing most people, students, teachers, parishioners, are going to think is an active shooter, because that’s what’s been ingrained in them. It could be. It just could make it easier for someone to get closer to a crowd. We don’t know. We have to navigate to this. We have to train our officers, retrain our officers how to respond to these type of calls, or dispatch centers how to field these calls. Educate our citizens the best we can, and we have to all act with logic, not emotion. Emotional thinking is likely to be different from logical thinking always. So this is the law of the land. We’re not going to change it, but we have to figure out how to navigate it. There’s like five other states in America, which have had open carry for years, and seem to go okay. There’s always that learning curve in the beginning, those few people that are going to test the water and just be asses. But outside of that, somehow we’re all going to get through this.”
A Monroe County Sheriff’s Office vehicle was recently donated to an automotive class in the schools to help students further their education and preparing for future careers in the industry.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We’re always glad to be a good partner. The high school called a new program to put together for the kids. Bill used to work for County Public Works, really good guy. So we’re happy to give a car that they can help these kids prepare for the future, do good stuff with, that’s what this partnership is about at all levels. Speaking of partnerships, there’s another great partner is Sunbelt Rentals. They’ve been so good to us. Every time we have something going on we need some equipment, they never take money. They won’t take money. They just donate stuff. We were working for the Alligator Lighthouse swim a couple weeks ago, and it started in the wee hours of morning. We went to get some lighting to help light up the air to make it safe. And again, they brought them, put them out there, set up all the lights. Wouldn’t take any money. They’ve been such a great partner to this community, and we always want to acknowledge our partners, we give them certificates of appreciation, come out, shake their hand, call their bosses and make sure the community knows what good stuff people like Sunbelt do in this community. Again, it’s partnerships at all levels, internal, external, whether it be helping out Key West High School here, whether it be somebody helping us out, we all have to work together to keep making this community what it is, one of the greatest places ever.”