Crime

Amid the abandoned chemistry notes and other debris left behind after a deadly shooting at Florida State University are lingering questions about how the stepson of a beloved sheriff’s deputy tasked with school safety at a middle school became the accused gunman.Political science student Phoenix Ikner was a long-standing member of a sheriff’s office youth advisory council and was steeped in the family-like culture of the agency. When officers rushed to the university’s student union on reports of gunfire, authorities say it was the 20-year-old who used his stepmother’s former service weapon to open fire, killing two men and wounding six others.

FSU reported an active shooter on its campus Wednesday around noon.

A Lehigh Acres woman is going to spend 10 years in federal prison for a fraud scheme that netted her nearly $4.2 million.As part of her sentence, U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Barber ordered 49-year-old Madelyn Hernandez to forfeit $4,199,498.42, the proceeds of the wire fraud.

Timothy Craig Jolloff, 48, and Lisa Ann Jolloff, 58, of Fort Myers have been sentenced to eight years and one month, and three years, respectively, in federal prison for wire fraud, bank fraud and illegal monetary transactions connected to a COVID relief fraud case.U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Barber handed down the sentences Friday.

Seth Miller visited his client at North Florida’s Jackson Correctional Institution in February of 2019 with some good news. The client, Thomas Gilbert, was serving a life sentence for a 1973 murder in North Miami Beach he always said he didn’t commit.That afternoon, Miller, the executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, informed Gilbert they had discovered powerful new evidence of his innocence that included police files from 1977 containing an entire reinvestigation of his case with multiple witness statements saying Gilbert was not present, the results of a polygraph Gilbert took “exculpating” him, and a confession from a man who said he was the one who actually committed the murder.

Suncoast Estates sits in the middle of North Fort Myers in an area they say has been forgotten and neglected by the area's politicians. They'd like some attention.

The first good night's sleep in years for the daughter of a murdered couple came the night Florida executed her parents' killer earlier this month, she says in a new interview.“There’s a weight that’s been lifted off of us,” said Maranda Malnory, 29, of Cape Coral, in a phone conversation from her home. “We can move forward. We’re never going to move past it, but it’s not looming there all the time.”Malnory, 29, was less than one month away from her 2nd birthday when James Ford murdered her parents, Greg and Kim Malnory, in rural Charlotte County in southwest Florida. Malnory was left to the elements in a car seat in her father’s blue pickup after her parents’ murders, and police found her and her parents’ bodies the next morning.

The Florida Department of Financial Services, Criminal Investigations Division, is seeking to identify an individual believed to have been on a Lehigh Acres church's property during an arson incident.

SunPass officials say they are aware of a phishing scam involving use of the prepaid toll program's name.The scam uses text messages requesting prompt payment to avoid fees. The messages also contain a link to a fraudulent website in an attempt to collect information. Officials said SunPass does not send these messages.

A Florida man convicted of killing a husband and wife at a remote farm as the couple’s toddler looked on was put to death Thursday in the state’s first execution of the year.James Dennis Ford, 64, was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison, state officials said.