Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM yesterday morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
With the unrest in the Middle East and recent military operations in Iran, rest assured the MCSO is ready for anything that could happen.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We have to be ready for whatever comes up for the Sheriff’s Office. And here right now, we’re in some difficult times in America and abroad, a lot of concerns about terrorism, not only externally, but internally. All the people that have come to this country the last so many years, we don’t really know who’s in this country, which is scary. There’s probably many sleeper cells. We saw a shooting in Texas, which was an anti-American, pro Ayatollah, individual who brought out a rifle and shot and killed a couple people, and police showed up pretty quickly, put him down. So we continue to pass, share information. We are part of the regional domestic security Task Force, which is a South Florida, all law enforcement working together sharing information, sharing resources, intel gathering, to act as one big team to try to prevent and respond to any accidents, incidents that may occur. So those are important to focus on. Just last week, about 15 of our members, I was one of them, took a terrorism liaison officer class to try to better be prepared to know what to do, know who to call, know how to deal with situations. We just have to do the best we can to try to mitigate disaster. Be prepared when something hits and when something does happen, make every effort we can to prevent it from occurring. But you never know when something bad could happen anywhere from the smallest little community to the largest community.”
A man was arrested for assault and battery near Wisteria Island recently.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is a difficult area to police. We have to get our friends at Coast Guard or FWC at times to help bring us out to these calls that take place on Wisteria or other areas outside of the jurisdiction of Key West Police. This was a 60 foot Viking, an older vessel where people were on board. Some altercation took place, and of course, that individual grabbed a weapon which was initially identified as a shotgun. Later on, sheriff’s office police divers located the weapon to be a Daisy Red Rider BB gun, but the individual who thought it was a shotgun threatened to kill him at some point in time, struck him in the face with the butt of the gun. The gun wound up going overboard. At some point in time, somebody jumped off the boat to try to flee the boat and go to another boat. It was kind of a chaotic scene. We did see the injuries consistent with being struck in the face with a butt of some type of gun. We ultimately did arrest individuals there for an aggravated assault, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, other related charges. We had to bring our police divers in from the sheriff’s office to try to locate the weapon. In this case, we did send in divers in the Key West channel and located this gun, this BB gun, so difficult, for sure, manpower intensive to deal with those onboard vessels that are not ashore. Between again, having to get our friends in the United States Coast Guard do such a great job FWC to help us, at times, to get on the water. But again, then have to bring a whole dive team to try to recover this. It spends a lot of time, money, effort, but at the end of the day that’s just part of our job, and that individual is sitting in MCJ.”
An assault with concrete rocks being thrown at an individual also happened recently in Islamorada.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is a 37 year old male from Islamorada. This is about 5:15 in the afternoon. The male came on this property where a woman was outside, and started yelling and screaming and started picking up broken pieces of cinder blocks, throwing it at her. She started running and trying to get away from this frantic, irate individual, as he continued to lob concrete block parts at her, she got into her house, locked herself in, called 911, sheriff’s office responded pretty quickly, got on scene, tried to assess the situation. We identified, located something pretty quickly. We did arrest him for a variety of charges, used aggravated assault charges, throwing a deadly missile, throwing an object like this is classified under a law as a deadly missile, something that could do bodily harm to a person. So we are able to get this person under arrest pretty quickly and get them in the jail. So this was scary, concrete blocks being thrown towards your head to kill you, do permanent damage, take out an eye, and again, just an individual who was just spouting off that he thought the woman and her husband were putting some type of radiation rays at him. So obviously, this person’s not thinking clearly. I’m not sure if it’s due to massive illness, drug use or alcohol or combinations therein, but a person who clearly was not thinking clearly.”
A man was charged with burglary, loitering, prowling, and resisting arrest in Key Largo recently.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is a 39 year old male from Miami who’s a career criminal. We run his criminal history and come back with 150 pages of information for a bunch of arrests. He’s spent more time in jail than I’m free, but a career criminal with just an extensive, lengthy career history. We started experiencing some vehicle burglaries up in that area, and we were trying to combat a plan and try to identify and find this person, or persons. When about 3: 30 in the morning, a person’s ring door camera came on, and then alerted to his phone. He on his phone, saw the person going into his vehicle, contacted the sheriff’s office. We sent multiple units there. We set up an inner and outer perimeter. We started trying to locate this person. We had a good description, based on the ring door camera, video, what he looked like and what he was wearing. But this person had fled at some point down. We could not locate him. We did bring in the sheriff’s office drone team. We do have drones. Our drones do have infrared. This is a basically night vision heat signature, trying to get a person. So we set up a drone, and we were able to, at some period of time, find a person that was hunkered down. We were pretty quickly able to find a person that was hiding in someone’s yard. And we grabbed this person, quickly identified this is the person in question, and we did charge him with multiple charges of prowling, burglary. We ultimately determined that he had multiple warrants, for violation of probation. Indicated a warrant for armed burglary, the warrant for possessing a firearm. We determined about 150 pages of a criminal history, which is amazing for someone 39 years old, had that extensive of a record. We’re so glad to get him off the streets and arrest him. This is a prolific criminal burglar who’s all night long, just going through people’s houses, yards, cars, trying to steal anything he can. So we got him pretty quickly. Again, talking about strong partnerships, a partnership with the citizens, and obviously technology ring doorbell cameras really helped us to know it was occurring, know who he looked like, what he was wearing, and have that relationship with the citizens. Call us right away, fast, rapid response from the sheriff’s office to get on scene so quickly, ability to lock down the neighborhood, keep him within an inner perimeter, and then special tools and equipment, in this case here, drones equipped with flare signatures trying to locate these people, we have to have special equipment teams, whether it be SWAT teams or dive teams to get that gun or drone teams to get this person. All this equipment technology is so critical to our job to be efficient and effective.”
Every threat is taken seriously by MCSO, including the one last week at the Marathon Middle School.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “I take every threat to be real. Just focus on that it’s a real threat, and it could occur. We did have a student who found a note crumpled up in a classroom, and the note, presumably, we understand, was not there just a period or two earlier, and the class was empty and second period type thing. These two girls come in for class, they find a crumpled note. It talks about going to shoot the school up. I have a gun. They do a great job to get it to the teacher right away. Our school resource officer gets notified, immediately calls for additional resources, really immediately goes to a lockdown status. We, at these times, bring in massive amounts of manpower, all our patrol divisions in that area, all our detectives, we bring administrative personnel in to manage the scene as incident commanders, and we lock down the school and get the message out pretty quickly. So the sheriff’s office gets overwhelmed with calls through our dispatch center, people worried about their kids at school, what’s going on, and we immediately put out a message to try to be proactive and transparent. We try to send a message out to try to ease parents or let them know what’s going on, and reduce the volume of calls that are coming into dispatch trying to find out what’s happening. We did bring in detectives, and we do have a person of interest, a student in school who we spoke to that day, spoke to their parents. That investigation continues at this point in time, but we did contact the school and contacted the superintendent to make sure he’d been briefed. He responded back he’d already been briefed by the principal and thanked me for reaching out to him. We want to make sure we have these communications going all level, internal, external, talking with our partners, whether it be in law enforcement, our partners in the community, in this case, our partners in the school districts, we have to make sure everyone’s communicating, briefed, informed and has the same message, receiving the same message. Make sure the same message received is the same message that’s been sent out, message sent versus message received. We’ve got to make sure they’re consistent.”