Cop stalks girlfriend, runs her license plate 70 times in 7 months, Florida cops say
A police officer now charged with stalking ran the license plates of his girlfriend's vehicle and her family's vehicles over 100 times in the course of seven months, Florida investigators said.
The now-ex-girlfriend of 29-year-old Officer Jarmarus Brown with the Orange City Police Department suspected him of using license plate readers to stalk her while they were in a relationship, deputies with the Volusia Sheriff's Office wrote in an arrest affidavit filed Feb. 4.
An attorney for Brown was not listed in court records as of Feb. 7.
She accused Brown of becoming controlling a few months into their relationship, which began in late 2023.
She said Brown would FaceTime her and show her footage on his work computer of her vehicle driving through an intersection, and he would often sit in his patrol car outside her work or show up uninvited to where she was, according to deputies.
She said he demanded she share her location with him and stay on the phone with him constantly, then one time she found an Apple AirTag in a new wallet he had given her after she had lost her last wallet, deputies said.
When she confronted him about it, he told her he put the AirTag GPS in her wallet in case she ever lost it again, she told investigators.
After their 10-month relationship ended, another officer she was friends with told her that Brown had been using a police database to track her during their relationship because he believed she was lying and cheating on him, according to deputies.
The officer recounted that one time Brown invited him to a 'stakeout' to find his girlfriend's vehicle, the affidavit says. Another time, while they were on patrol together, the officer noticed Brown was looking up his girlfriend's vehicle using the license plate reader system, and that officer told Brown to stop, deputies said.
After Brown's ex reported him, the Orange City Police Department audited his searches on the license plate reader system and found that over the course of seven months, he had searched his girlfriend's vehicle tag 69 times, her mom's tag 24 times and her brother's tag 15 times, according to the affidavit.
The investigation was turned over to the Volusia Sheriff's Office, and Brown told a detective that he only ran his girlfriend's tag 10 times, and he did so for safety reasons.
He described his actions as 'dumb,' saying it was a case of 'emotions flowing, mind going,' according to the affidavit.
He was charged with stalking and unauthorized use of computer or electronic devices, records show.
McClatchy News reached out to the Orange City Police Department to confirm Brown's employment status.
Volusia County includes the Daytona Beach metropolitan area on Florida's Atlantic Coast.
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