Florida Keys deputy accused of running interference for drug dealing boyfriend
A Monroe County sheriff’s deputy used her department’s computer database to help her boyfriend evade the law as he engaged in dealing drugs in the Florida Keys, according to her arrest warrant.
Deputy Jennifer Ketcham, 40, not only gave her boyfriend information helping him stay out of areas where her colleagues were operating, she also ran license plate numbers for him when he asked if certain unmarked cars were undercover vehicles, according to the July 31 report.
Investigators reviewing the 11,845 text messages between the couple also discovered that in November, he asked Ketcham to send a photograph of a detective who was surveilling a house on Roberta Street in Key West. Ketcham found a picture of the cop on Facebook and sent it to him, the warrant states.
Ketcham remains in county jail on a bond of $610,000. She is charged with 19 felony counts of misuse of law enforcement computers, computer networks and electronic devices. The sheriff’s office placed her on administrative leave without pay pending an internal affairs investigation.
“I am committed to keeping this community informed of significant events that occur in this agency — good and bad,” Sheriff Rick Ramsay said in a statement.
Ketcham was hired on June 2, 2021, and her annual salary is $66,646, said Adam Linhardt, sheriff’s office spokesman. Her attorney, Dustin Hunter, did not immediately respond to the Miami Herald’s request for comment.
Ketcham began seeing the man last summer when he was 17 years old, according to the warrant. In text messages to a colleague regarding their relationship, she referred to him as “#1” and moved him into her apartment at the Sunset Marina in Key West, the report states.
Those conversations detail she knew he was involved in dealing drugs, and Ketcham and her colleague discuss him making trips to deliver and pick up drugs in the Redland agriculture district in South Miami-Dade, according to the warrant.
Ketcham was an acting supervisor while she was dating the man, and, her colleague told investigators that her squad “knew to stay away from certain avenues on Stock Island due to their relationship,” Detective David Fernandez wrote in the warrant.
Ketcham was so dedicated to her boyfriend, she arrested his mother at his request on June 11, 2023, according to the report. She detailed the arrest in a text message to her colleague the next day.
“He called me and told me where she would be and what car she would be driving. I served a warrant and she got a false name charge,” Ketcham texted, according to the warrant. “That’s literally between he and I.”
The Herald called a cellphone number listed in the warrant as belonging to Ketcham’s boyfriend, but the call went to voicemail.
The cops got that phone after serving a joint search warrant with Key West police, the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations and the IRS on his mother’s house on Seidenburg Avenue in Key West in July. That’s where they found several conversations in which Ketcham appeared to be running interference for her boyfriend by accessing the sheriff’s office database.
For instance, on June 9, 2023, she texted him: “Our Narc unit is out on Stock Island right now.”
On Sept. 6, 2023, she told him of a drug raid at a home on Big Coppitt Key, according to the report.
On Sept. 8, 2023, she told him deputies stopped a man in a car and that person agreed to be a confidential informant for the police.
And, on Dec. 22, 2023, she texted her boyfriend to warn him about another drug raid by police on a house on United Street in Key West, the report states.
When detectives asked Ketcham on June 20 if she was aware her boyfriend was a drug dealer, she told them “she had a ‘gut feeling’ he was involved in criminal activities, but did not have any evidence to support this,” Fernandez wrote.
