Category: Florida

Someone in Jupiter, Florida called the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission over the weekend to report a dead alligator, which is already a sentence with several possible endings, none of them good. The ending in this case: the gator had a hammer-shaped wound in its forehead, because apparently nothing in Florida is allowed to die from just one cause.

Investigators tracked down Desmond Keogh, who admitted he shot the alligator once in the head and then, having already accomplished the objective, struck it several more times with a hammer anyway. This is less “putting an animal out of its misery” and more “a man who bought a hammer and was determined to use it on something.”

Keogh also did not have active alligator tags, which in Florida is the bureaucratic equivalent of fishing without a license, except the fish weighs 400 pounds and comes with teeth. He’s now facing charges for illegally killing a protected alligator, discharging a firearm where he shouldn’t have, and using a firearm in the commission of a felony — three separate crimes stacked on top of an animal he could have simply left alone.

The alligator was not available for comment. The hammer’s current whereabouts are unknown.

Don’t take our word for it: CBS12 has the full story. It’s exactly as described.

Jaythan Gilder walked into the Tiffany & Co. at Orlando’s Mall at Millenia in February 2025 and did what any upstanding citizen might do when faced with a case full of diamond earrings worth more than $760,000: he told staff he was negotiating a purchase on behalf of a professional basketball player. This is, apparently, a sentence that works on jewelry store employees, because they let him handle the merchandise — at which point he grabbed it, shoved an employee out of the way, and ran.

Police eventually caught up with him. Gilder’s response to being arrested with three-quarters of a million dollars in stolen diamonds on his person was to swallow the evidence. Not metaphorically. Authorities then had to monitor him for nearly two weeks — reportedly the longest and least glamorous stakeout in Orlando mall history — before the jewelry was, let’s say, returned to circulation.

A jury has now found Gilder guilty of robbery and grand theft. Sentencing is pending, as is, one assumes, a very thorough conversation with his digestive tract’s legal team.

The unnamed NBA player he claimed to represent remains unindicted and presumably unaware he almost owned the world’s most expensive fiber supplement.

All of this actually happened. News4Jax confirmed it, conviction and all.

David Sartin Jr., 40, of St. Petersburg, has allegedly solved the eternal bank-robbery dilemma of “how do I not get recognized” by becoming, convincingly, an old man. Twice. Federal prosecutors say Sartin robbed a Largo bank in August and a St. Petersburg bank in September wearing a prosthetic elderly-gentleman mask, politely instructing tellers to skip the dye packs, because even a career criminal has standards.

After the first job, he reportedly swapped his getaway car for a bicycle, pedaled to the bank, robbed it, pedaled back to the car, and drove off — a disguise-and-transportation strategy best described as community theater. Before robbery number two, he spray-painted the white roof of his getaway vehicle black, apparently on the theory that law enforcement, unlike toddlers, cannot recognize a car by its shape.

Agents searching a property connected to Sartin found a second old-man mask, a fake handgun, black-paint-stained gloves, and — the detail that elevates this from crime blotter to scripture — a journal dated 2021 and titled “God’s Best friend is a Bank Robber! Uncle Henry Cops and Robbers the world through the eyes of a Bank Robber.” We do not know what it means either. Sartin was already on supervised release for five Texas bank robberies committed in 2016, which he also allegedly pulled off in a similar mask, suggesting a man who found his bit decades ago and simply refuses to retire it.

He now faces two counts of bank robbery, each carrying up to 20 years, which means the only thing in this story with a longer runtime than his potential sentence is the journal’s prose style.

We did not make this up. The U.S. Department of Justice has the receipts, and they are notarized.

On a Friday in Hillsborough County, someone broke into a parked work truck and made off with multiple bags of tools worth several hundred dollars, all caught on surveillance video, trailer and all. On Saturday, deputies spotted a man riding a bicycle down the road pulling that exact same trailer, in what can only be described as an unusually confident encore performance.

That man was identified as 56-year-old Joe Talmadge Butts, who was arrested and found to be carrying methamphetamine at the time. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office did not need much of an investigation, on account of the culprit having returned to the literal scene of the crime pulling the literal evidence.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere about not riding your stolen trailer past the same business the day after you stole it, but Butts appears to have skipped that chapter.

We did not make this up. CBS12 has the receipts.

A 77-year-old U.S. Postal Service worker in Martin County has been charged with animal cruelty after deputies discovered she had allegedly been collecting feral cats along her mail route and bringing them home. The final tally: 92 animals, 80 cats and 12 dogs, living inside a house with no air conditioning and up to a foot of animal waste on the floor.

Martin County Fire Rescue had to send in a hazmat team just to ventilate the property before anyone could safely go inside, which tells you roughly what mail delivery had turned into on this particular route. The sheriff called it one of the worst hoarding cases his office has ever handled, a sentence that carries real weight in Florida.

The animals are now recovering at the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast, many underweight or dealing with skin and dental issues. Several were microchipped, and at least five have already been reunited with their actual owners, meaning some of these cats had homes the entire time and simply got picked up along the way, like a very committed rewards program nobody signed up for.

Somewhere in Martin County there is a mail carrier position posting that badly, badly needs the phrase “no side projects” added to the job description.

We did not make this up. News4JAX has the receipts.