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.
MCSO is quite quick when responding to any call.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We pride ourselves in our response time. We generally have a two minute or less response time to incidents. We have to get there quickly to assess, deal with, trying to make things safe and then coordinate. Crashes on IS 1 is the responsibility of FHP, not the sheriff’s office, but we don’t want citizens and visitors waiting or not getting care or custody and control of a situation. We want to come out and make sure that traffic’s flowing, people are safe, determine what needs we have for medical or other matters. So it’s all comes down to customer service, and trying to provide a top level quality service to our citizens, even if it’s not our primary responsibility, it doesn’t change the fact one of my citizens needs help, and we want to be there to provide help for them.”
A number of officers from MSCO received commendations from the Back the Blue organization.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Blue Marlin Jeweler is one of our sponsors. Armando Gonzalez, a great young man who’s out there helping, assisting, supporting this community. We talk so much about how important it is to have these relationships, all of us working together, supporting each other while we’re out there to help aid and assist and support our citizens and in return, they’re always there for us. Your monthly acknowledgement of Back the Blue and identifying the officers from the city and county doing great jobs. It is just a testament to yourself, to Blue Marlins rulers, to so many other leaders who always step up and are friends supporters of this agency and the men and women who do a difficult, challenging job, it means so much when these guys and gals get acknowledged, but also when they know that they are appreciated and supported. Means the world to them, and we’re so thankful.”
Officers were out at the Nautical Market with the Lower Keys Chamber of Commerce this past weekend.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “It is another successful event that we’ve been doing this for years to provide the security, protection, visibility, presence, parking, traffic control, crossing pedestrians and trying to keep US 1 traffic flowing. We’ve got a really good system out there to cross people in packs and to make sure we have strategic locations where they can cross safely with cones and uniformed police officers. So it’s our number one goal, safety of the pedestrians first. But second is the movement of flow of traffic to have the least impact on our visitors and the locals who have to use this road system. So I think again, we did a really good job out there. No one got hurt, no one got injured, no altercations. Good presence at the festival to make sure it’s safe, and we kept traffic flowing. So this is a tough balance, but we have to do the best we can at this difficult time of year when we’ve got so many cars in the road to keep those cars moving.”
A guilty verdict of murder came down for Daniel Weisberger, 21, from a case a few years ago.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is a sad case. Now I’m glad there’s some closure. It has been high profile in the media for years, this young man juvenile, I think, like 17, when he committed the murder of his brother and attempted murder of his father. Stabbed and killed his brother, Pascal, great young man from the Upper Keys and then stabbed his father. It’s a really, really sad situation. Here’s a young man who I believe, just had a difficult home life. I believe a lot of his emotional problems are related to his divorced mother and father, who didn’t really get along, who fought a lot. I think this young man was passed between the two homes on a regular basis. His letter, he wrote, when all this went down, kind of articulated the fact of how bad he was treated by his father and mother, while they’re not going to like hearing this, but this is the own words of this young man who wrote, explained why he was doing this, why he had this outburst, was these parents treated him so poorly, and he felt that they didn’t care about him, and felt that they passed him back and forth like a ping pong ball and felt that the younger brother was loved by both and that he was treated differently than the younger one. It’s so sad, but he tried to have a defense, not guilty by reason of insanity, which we never believed that he was insane. We believe he had emotional problems, anger management problems, home problems with the parents that resulted in a lot of this stuff. But at the end of the day, he was found to be competent. Found that he was not insane, and found to be held accountable for the murder of his brother. His father has been very vocal thinking that the kid needs help and should not be charged with a crime. But we believe that the brother deserves some accountability for his actions against the other brother who is the victim in this case. It’s just, it’s a terrible, sad situation, for sure. I sat in part of the trial myself, listened to part of it, but it was, it was heartbreaking. Nobody won, but there is some closure, whether people like the outcome or not, at least there’s closure.”
A car thief stole a car from Stock Island last week.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “This was a service center, garage on Stock Island. He was working on this car, a black Thunderbird that was brought in for service. One of the mechanics pulled it out, running, parked it, walked away from it, didn’t shut it off, didn’t take the keys out, eventually forgot about it. The business closed up, leaving the car out there just running, and some individual, a Latin male, came across the car, saw the car running, jumped into it, and took the car. We got a report about the car being stolen. We put a full court pressure to find this car in the city, in the county. My officers were looking for this car diligently, and we found it as part of our efforts to find it, parked in the back part of I think a bank. He was sitting in the car. So we were able to arrest him for Grand Theft Auto, recovered the vehicle, get the vehicle back to the owner. The owner actually called me to thank me, what a great job our people did. The owner is a non smoker, so he was aggravated that the guy was a smoker, chain smoking in the car, that the car was dirty and filthy inside. It was a failure on part of the business. It’s lucky that no one got hurt or killed because they would assume risk liability, exposure above and beyond just having a car stolen from their property if someone would have gotten hurt or killed.”
Scams are also ongoing – a recent one allegedly came from Apple where someone apparently won a prize.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Look, it was too good to be true. Sometimes you’ve got to look a little closer, or they use a lot of scare tactics, something’s going to happen right away, if you don’t do something right now, someone’s been arrested. There was a thing coming in. It looked like it was saying it was from Apple security, and the return address was this crazy email address that just doesn’t make any sense. These companies that are legit try to have relatively short email addresses that you can remember, not all crazy, cryptic ones, but they believed it, started providing information, and ultimately lost over $38,000, which is not going to be recovered, because most of these scams are from out of country. They’ve got bad IP addresses. They’re ghosting the phones, ghosting the phone numbers. They’re getting either false names or they’re going through someone’s Rolodex to try to use a name that someone may know. So this was a sad situation to lose that much cash. I saw a case, I think, in California, someone lost $855,000 recently in a scam. So it’s amazing that people will provide their access. Never give your personal information, your PIN numbers, your passwords, your security numbers, security information, banking information. They’re saying your computers been hacked. We’ve got to clean your computer up. I need to get access, to get the virus off. No, it’s just always going to be a scam. This weekend, we had someone look on the arrest page at the sheriff’s office, see a young woman is arrested. Well, it didn’t have her birthday address, but they somehow were able to get their last name, checked through addresses in Key West, make a bunch of phone calls and anybody with last same last name. So they found someone who actually was the parents of this girl arrested. They say she’s in jail. We’ve got to get her out. We need $2,000 to get her out. You don’t want her sitting in the jail. She’s going to get hurt, $2,000 we can bond out right away. You need to go to this Big Coppitt Circle K, there’s a kiosk there for Bitcoin and send the money. Here’s the information, and we’ll get her out of jail right away. So anytime we talk about Bitcoin, kiosk, Green Dot cards, go to Walgreens to pick up a card and give me the number off the back, every single time that’s a scam. Sheriff’s Office, other places don’t take Bitcoin. We don’t go to kiosks. We don’t take green dot cards. Nor does Florida Keys Electric Co Op, Aqueduct Authority, all these other names they put out there time and time and time again. People, businesses are not going to ask for that type of form of payment. It’s just irrational thinking based off emotion, not logic. But it’s emotional when your kid’s in jail and you’re trying to get them out or they tell you that your grandson’s in jail in Mexico and needs get money to get out. They have people calling, pretending to be the grandson, granddaughter, they somehow identify who the grandparents are. I’m in jail, crying and sobbing. It’s not their grand kid. They’re so emotionally in tune that they don’t think a second to hang up, call their daughter, their granddaughter, somebody say, hey, are you Mexico? Are you really in jail? No, hang up. Call that person they alleged to be. They’re going to answer the phone. Call Keys Energy, Electric Co Op, Aqueduct Authority, Sheriff’s Office. Verify what someone else is telling you. Hang up. Call and verify with a good number to be legit.”
Again, 20th Street in Marathon is in the news with some lawsuits. It’s an area where homeless people tend to camp.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We’re going to keep working on that problem. The problem is, if you push all those people out, where are they going to go? We patrol there every day, so there is a presence, security, there’s containment, but there’s some new law the governor passed, which limits the ability for people to camp in public areas. There’s also a lawsuit, though, that’s, I think, being filed by Fisherman’s Point and people out there who have commercial boats that don’t want them close to them. I think some pressures coming on that we’re going to be talking about today in my staff meeting. Where do we go from here? This is not necessarily the sheriff’s office problem, but it is something that we deal with. We have crimes that take place out there. So we want to work on an action plan to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And knowing that, I believe this is going to come to a head that 20th Street here soon. So we don’t want to be caught off guard. We want to be have an action plan, no matter what the city leaders of Marathon or the property owners being the state of Florida, decide that we can be ready to help, aid and assist.”