Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning for an update of what’s going on in Monroe County.
This is Hurricane Preparedness Week.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Hurricane season, it’s really important for us to have a plan. We want to talk about having a pre plan, a personal plan, a home family, a family plan. We don’t want to wait for a crisis to be upon us and trying to get the checklist and be panicked. We want to have a pre list ahead of time to go through, a checklist per se. We want to know what you should have ahead of time, batteries and foods and certain things you keep at your house, have a plan for evacuation, plan for animals. We talk about medicine for yourself and medications for your animals too, and food. So, the sheriff’s office, all of our officers have to have personal plans, all their districts and patrol stations have district level plans. Every year with Sheriff’s Office, all my units divisions are required to submit a current updated, fiscal year 24-25 hurricane plan, updated roster, updated information on anything we need to put out. Sometimes we make a plan but if it’s three, four years old, that plan is worth nothing. So at the Sheriff’s Office, we renew our plans before Hurricane Season each and every year. Our listeners should do the same thing. Make sure your trees are done, when a hurricane’s approaching know what you should or shouldn’t do, know when to leave and what to put away and make sure that your yard stuff doesn’t become a hazard for other people’s properties too. So there’s a lot involved. We’re seeing more stronger storms, and they’re projecting a pretty busy year this year. We hope it’s not true. But that’s the early projections is kind of a busy season.”
An SUV near Hurricane Hole was on its roof and had flipped over yesterday afternoon.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “That’s kind of a busy area, so much traffic coming into that Key West area of College road, US 1. It does have a lot of crashes that we deal with. I want to highlight the partnership. We had Key West Police, Monroe County Sheriff, FHP. All three state and local agencies on scene. We work so good together. This does affect the city for traffic flow. We did what appears to be a hit and run. FHP is handling the primary investigation. That vehicle was located in the city abandoned. So the hit and run vehicle caused the crash, caused the vehicle to flip over on its roof. The vehicle fled south into the city, as we said later on was located. Our first and foremost is to try to check on injuries. There was a female driver with some minor injuries who had to be checked out, treated for minor injuries. Thank God they weren’t worse. Then obviously also trying to keep traffic flowing. Our goal was to try to alternate or move traffic or shift traffic to the opposite lane. So we’re able to get at least one lane flowing each direction. But with that it does cause backlogs pretty quickly because you’re driving so slow with the traffic and people are stopping to look at the car upside down. You get police, fire, rescue, eventually tow trucks have to get there, we’ve got to get the vehicle turned over, we’ve got to clean the road, got to worry about hazards. There’s a lot to these types of things that people wonder, why is it taking so long? Well, there’s so many factors between the medical, between police, fire and rescue, between tow trucks and investigations. So it does take some time, unfortunately, but that case is still under investigation. So there wasn’t a press release from the sheriff because while we responded as the primary first response, but the actual investigation is done by another agency and we try not to speak on behalf of other agencies.”
A 38 year old Key Largo, Florida man was arrested Saturday after threatening someone with a gun and fleeing from the sheriff’s office.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Not much good happens after 1:30 or after midnight. This is 1:30 in the morning, alcohol is involved, so we’ve got alcohol-related poor decisions. This appears to be a domestic related matter at a residence, male, female, a domestic situation. The male is pretty angry, intoxicated and making poor decisions. He elects to introduce a firearm into this domestic and threatened the female, who is the domestic partner and would not let her leave, which is where kidnapping comes in, false imprisonment. If you fail to let someone leave and you detain him with some type of level of force. you’ve potentially kidnapped them and committed a crime therein. So he’s introduced a weapon, we get notified. By time we get there, he’s fled the scene. We get description of the vehicle. One of my alert officers sees the vehicle in North Key Largo. We tried to stop the vehicle and then the vehicle flees and it starts pursuing at higher speeds. Pursuit gets into 78 miles an hour. He keeps going and eventually he drives back to the residence where this crime took place. We follow him there as part of his pursuit. Get him out of the vehicle, he’s intoxicated. At the end of the day, we do recover with gun. We do a DUI investigation, we do the domestic violence investigation, we arrest him for DUI, fleeing and eluding, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon being the firearm pointed at the female domestic partner, the kidnapping by forcefully not allowing her to leave and false imprisonment for her not being able to leave freely. These are poor decisions of which gets compounded by constant bad decisions, which are generally based on alcohol influence decisions. It probably wouldn’t have been a domestic fight if you weren’t drunk, you probably wouldn’t have pointed a gun at a domestic partner and threatened her, you probably wouldn’t have forced her to not leave if you weren’t drunk, you probably wouldn’t have been in a pursuit with the police. So many bad things happen. When from nothing, some argument turns into a verbal argument escalates into now you’ve got multiple felonies and you’re sitting in jail, and you’re going to have to answer to some really serious charges.”
Drugs continue to be an issue and recently the Special Investigations Division of MCSO executed a search warrant at Enterprise Ave, Big Pine Key, where a 48 year old Big Pine Key man was arrested.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is a good job on my special operations team. This is a really good neighborhood, not a neighborhood you would think there’d be a lot of drug trafficking dealings going on. But we received multiple complaints about this house, about this individual particular. We received information about people potentially who bought and overdosed on drugs he had sold in the past. So it was really kind of an important case. Anytime we have drugs, especially when we’re tracking these drugs, potentially back to people who are overdosing, it shows the magnitude and the severity of these types of cases. Great job by my narcotics teams. We got probable cause and a search warrant to search the residence for narcotics. In the wee hours of the morning we brought in our special operations team, we brought on our SWAT team, and we struck the house and executed a search warrant. We did find our suspect inside the residence. We also found about 5.3 ounces of methamphetamines and methamphetamines we know are so deadly, that’s a large quantity of methamphetamines, some cocaine, drug paraphernalia, signs of drug dealing, drug trafficking. So clearly this was not a personal use residence. This is an individual who is a 48 year old male from Big Pine and lives in that location who is not only a drug user, potentially, but clearly a drug dealer. So a bad person, a bad person to have in your neighborhood. We arrested him. We put his picture on the website. We want people to know who these individuals are. We want their neighbors to know who’s living next to them across the street and to highlight that this is a bad person and he is not a pillar of community, but he is in the Rick Ramsay Bed and Breakfast currently, and we hope he stays there for a while.”
A 28 year old man from Alberta, Canada did pass away while free diving off of Key West recently.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Right now my major crimes units is investigating this is as unattended death. This happened out there by dry rocks. It was a freediving accident, spearfishing. He went under to spear fish and never came back up. About five minutes later, other people in a boat, being family members and friends got in the water looking for him. They did find him in just about 15 feet of water, they found him on the bottom. They found his spear gun floating, partway up on the end of the shaft was a fish. He apparently speared a fish. We don’t know at this point in time, whether he was struggling to get the fish out of a hole and got caught, jammed up, whether he got caught temporary around the fishing gear, the spear gun, somehow he drowned, whether it was a shallow water blackout. So right now that’s yet to be determined. Saltwater drowning is going to be the cause. We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner to make the final determination. But clearly it’s going to be saltwater drowning. We just have to try to see if there’s any signs on the body that can better indicate whether there’s any type of marks around the arms or legs from the blind and the spear gun. We’ve seen that in the past, whether it’s any type of marks on the bodies indicating whether he had arms in the hole, trying to get a fish that was maybe stuck in there, maybe got himself stuck. So we’re not sure whether it was just a blackout. Clearly it was an accidental death. Clearly it’s going to be a saltwater drowning. The question is can we determine what transpired to cause him to drown and we’ll have to work with the medical examiner and our team members to see if we can try to give a conclusion but either way it is just a sad, unfortunate accident while spearfishing, and we continue to talk about people that pass away in the Keys diving. There’s so many people per capita that are diving, whether it be inexperience, whether it be spearfishing, whether it be currents, whether it be in wrecks. There were two people that were row diving on the Upper Keys, that got misplaced over the weekend. The Coast Guard did a great job and also private recreational vehicles and private aircraft located two missing divers. So we continue to have people that get caught up in currents, or just inexperienced or lose their way. This is something the sheriff’s office, Coast Guard, FWC and our boating population deal with on a regular basis is trying to help aid and assist people who are in distress during difficult times, whether it be diving, boating, fishing, or whatever it may be, people get into trouble and that’s our job is to try to help aid and assist as get much as we can.”