Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
A 73-year-old Tavernier man was arrested last week because of the Halo Law, which establishes a 25-foot protective zone around first responders.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “He was angry that the county was taking action on these people who were using the right of ways for storage. He started getting verbally combative, making gestures towards officers, getting up in their face. Florida has what’s called the Halo Law, which protects distance around a law enforcement officer in the performance of his or her duties. You cannot come within 25 feet of an officer when told to back off, or you violate state law. You commit a crime. So the officer told him to step back away to have a 25 foot berth to no avail, this person just continued to be angry and violent and aggressive. At some point in time, we’re going to arrest him, detain him. He became more violent, started kicking, thrashing, pulling away. Ultimately, taken down to the ground, a scuffle took place. Eventually, he was handcuffed, secured. We had to take him to hospital and get him medically cleared because he had some abrasions and some scrapes from being on the ground, tossing around with deputies, and he was charged with multiple counts of resisting arrest, as well as violation of the Halo Law. For nothing. This was not his call, his battle, his argument. Why he elected to interject himself, I do not know. But for every action, there’s a reaction, and our officers are not going to let themselves be hurt, harmed, or not do their jobs because of people like this. So this is a poor decision made off of emotion, not logic. A logical thinker would say, I’m glad they’re getting these cars that are being used for storage in front of my house out of here. And the logical person would say, I’m not going to be out there fighting with police officers and disobeying commands for no reason, but we deal with this. This is illogical thinking.:
A 44-year-old man from Margate, Florida was arrested last week for attempting to steal more than $4,000 of alcohol from via the fraudulent use of credit cards.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “There were a lot of red flags here. This was an online purchase for a wedding, allegedly. The total was about $4,100 and the first several credit cards came back declined, declined, declined. So that should have been a red flag to the vendor right away that there’s something wrong here to have all these credit cards being declined, and if your cards are being declined, can you do 4100 dollars worth alcohol? Probably not. Eventually, the third, or fourth card did get approved initially, so it went through, and the person received the alcohol, and then sometime later, the charge was disputed by the actual owner of the credit card, who had later on reported the card as a fraudulent use. We had to go back through and try to identify who this person was, which wasn’t easy. The person is a 44-year-old male from Broward County, and we eventually did identify this person, did get a warrant for the arrest, and working with our friends in the Broward County area, were able to effect an arrest on him, and this is back in April when this complaint took place.”
A package of marijuana came ashore last week.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We talk about drugs found to say that drugs are alive and are continuing to flow through the Caribbean. This is a corridor for drugs, so it’s not uncommon that we have stuff found offshore behind canals or on beaches. This was a resident around the 77.5 mile marker who did find this on the beach, reported it, turned it over to the sheriff’s office. We did turn it over to the federal government. A lot of times you see markings on these kilos of drugs, whatever they may be. They could be numbers. They could be skull and crossbones. They could be, in this case, a lion. We’ve seen all kinds of different stuff. A lot of times, people believe that this is the cartels. The reality is those external markings generally are designating who the load is going to, because if you have someone smuggling 1000 kilos, well, a person may not be buying all 1000. There may be 300 going to this person, 300 to the next person, and 400 to another person. So they put specific markings on the outside the kilos, so they know which goes to which person. The government then takes it. They look at it. They analyze, try and determine what region it came from, how long they think it’s been in the water based on algae, maybe small little barnacles, whatnot, to determine a basic time they think it actually hit the water. They go back through their intelligence to try to see if they were aware of a load that was supposed to be coming in that may have got disrupted. The government uses it for intelligence gathering. After that is destroyed, the chance to find a person who once owned drugs that were being imported to the U.S. are about zero, and you can’t really fingerprint stuff that’s been in water for two weeks. They’re not going to come back most time because they’re from foreign third-world countries whose fingerprints aren’t on file. Just a lot of reasons why it’s just almost impossible to prove who owned some drugs down on the beach.”
A 35-year-old Marathon woman was arrested last week after threatening officers.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This woman is out in front of the Brass Monkey, which we’ve talked about in the past, has some unusual characters and some issues. She was in a dispute with a male in front of the Brass Monkey, and that’s when we got called for a disturbance, a woman with a knife, she was threatening a male and swinging the knife. So we respond to that. Well, we encountered her. She was very combative, non-compliant. Put the knife down, then picked it back up and was swinging the knife around and just really was in an unusual state between probably alcohol and or substance abuse, and just was acting bizarre, irrational, which makes it a very, very dangerous situation. When you’ve got an irrational armed herself with a knife and is making threats to bodily harm, those are really scary situations. So our officers did a really good job to try to de-escalate the situation, use less than lethal weapons to try to secure that weapon from her. Ultimately, we have to separate her from the weapon, handcuff, arrest her, and bring her down to MCJ where she needs to be. So again, this was I think late in the afternoon, but it still shows you just how difficult these things can be. This is like 4:30 in the afternoon. You don’t think much happens at 4:30, but we do have this woman who is heavily intoxicated with a knife. That is a direct present danger to officers, so she was arrested for aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer resisting arrest and intoxication charges. So again, a good job by our team members to deal with this call, and she’s where she needs to be at MCJ.”
National Night Out is coming up on Tuesday, August 4.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “That’s our effort to go out and continue to build everlasting relationships with our citizens, partnerships with other communities, and we’re going to be out here in in four parts of the county when partnering with Key West PD down here in Key West, and we just want to get together with our citizens and show them what the sheriff’s office has to offer, what we’re about, how diverse we are, make new friends, build these everlasting relationships. So that’ll be coming up. We’ll talk about it more, but on people’s radar. I always tell them if you haven’t gone, it’s a good time to come out and meet some really good people that are working hard to protect you and your families each and every day.”