See below for an important update.
Jeremy Dewitte's first arrest for impersonating a police officer happened more than twenty years ago and he hasn't slowed down since. In fact, Dewitte was arrested for impersonating a police officer three separate times in the last three months of 2019. In the interim Dewitte was hard at work racking up dozens of minor violations, with the occasional felony thrown in. To top it off, Dewitte is remarkably good at violating his probation.
In researching this case I created a spreadsheet to keep track of Dewitte's Florida record. See the craziness for yourself: tiny.cc/dewitt...
The story of Dewitte's first arrest takes more space than I have available here, so for now we begin when that case ends.
On 9/30/98 Jeremy Dewitte entered a plea of no contest to charges of impersonating a police officer and theft, instantly becoming a convicted felon. He was sentenced to five years probation, banned from Mobil gas stations for the duration, and ordered to repay a bit more than $14.
Fast forward through a couple of probation violations, 8 days jail, 6 months house arrest, and 3 years probation...
At this point you need to know that Dewitte's probation officer had told him "to find gainful work in a field other than security."
Then...on 5/7/01 someone told Dewitte's probation officer that the convicted felon was in possession of a firearm. Who reported him? Why, one of the people that had hired him... to work as a security guard. Through his company. Wait for it... "Dewitte Security."
The next day a warrant was issued and Dewitte was arrested, somehow managing to pick up new charges too.
This is how it went down:
"On 5/8/01, the arresting officer responded to [] to make contact with the defendant, who had an active capias for VOP. The arresting officer made phone contact with the defendant who advised that he was enroute. The defendant pulled up in a blue four door Chevy Lumina with dark tint. As the defendant opened the driver's door the officer heard a police scanner with OPD dispatching. The defendant had the scanner hooked up next to the driver's seat. The officer heard OPD units from the Southwest sector being dispatched to calls. Further inspection of the vehicle by the arresting officer, along with assisting officers, revealed white blinking lights mounted in the rear window and side wing windows. Also mounted in the windshield, were more lights behind the tinted strip, which when lit shined flashing blue."
On 10/8/01 Dewitte's probation morphed into a one-year sentence in Orange County Jail.
And you still don't even know about Dewitte's first arrest. You know, when he pretended to be a cop to steal $14 of gas. The full story is at tiny.cc/firstar...
~~~
A closing comment:
I have hundreds of pages of records from Dewitte's previous court cases, including the one that made him a registered sex offender. Other news outlets have reported on Dewitte's arrest using sensational "Sex Offender Arrested For Impersonating..." headlines, and - frankly - I am disappointed. It can be tough to get information on a sex crime case, but if you are going to run headlines highlighting that someone is a sex offender, you should know something about the case's gravity. According to the prosecutor - who certainly knew it was legally impossible - Dewtite had putatively "consensual" sex with a female who was not legally old enough to consent. She did not want Dewitte to receive a long sentence and neither did her parents. I question the ethics of running unqualified "Sex Offender Arrested!" headlines in reference to such a case. (Dewitte ended up having to serve four years for violating his probation, but that's a whole other story.)
UPDATE
Damning new information has emerged. Visit tiny.cc/newper.... Turn on captions.
In contextualizing the paragraph above - in particular the sentence beginning "She did not want Dewitte to receive..." it must be recognized that "she" was the prosecutor at Jeremy's VOP sentencing - my source was not the victim. That prosecutor was not the same ASA that had worked the original case, and they only had the original ASA's notes. In the interview linked above I confronted the victim with the transcript. In response, she explained what really happened.
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