Member Contribution: Diligence when reporting information

Recently, I had an acquaintance of mine that was caught up in “Operation Neptune” in Volusia County. I am writing this so you may warn others that are on the registry what happened to this guy, could easily happen to them if they are not vigilant.

When they came to his house, they checked his tag number against what they had in the paperwork from the Sheriffs office. One of the digits was put into the system wrong at the Sheriff Dept. when he did his quarterly registration. It had been this way for quite some time and he never noticed the error. For this reason, he wound up pleading guilty to a 3rd degree Felony and was given 2 Years Probation with the ankle monitor. He is only allowed to go to work and then home.

This is not all that happened to him. He lives in a House that has 2 additional small apartments within it. They charged him for not providing his landlady’s and the other tenants tag numbers and VIN numbers as well. When they asked him about the other vehicle, which belonged to the other tenant, he said it belonged to his room mate. He definitely used the wrong terminology to describe the other tenant. So he had a total of 3 felonys staring him in the face. His attorney (who I had thought was a very good attorney) at first was going to have him plead guilty and take a 7 year prison sentence! The night before he was going to plead guilty, we had a dinner for him at a Restaurant in Deland. We began talking about his case and he mentioned that he had told the Officer that the other car belonged to his room mate. I asked if the guy rents a room off him or what? His response was: No, he has his own apartment. I could not believe he had put himself at such risk by simply calling the other tenant a room mate. We told him there should be no way he should be responsible for his landlady or the other tenants car tags and VIN Numbers. The next day we all met with his attorney and he told him he was going to fight it all the way. Had it not been for us having dinner that night, he would now be in the DOC for 7 years. When he went to court, the Judge threw out the other 2 cases involving the landlady and the other tenant (because the Judge said the statute was vague), but would not throw out the clerical error charge. Even now, I do not agree with him being on probation or pleading guilty. But unfortunately, that is the way this system works.