POLK COUNTY, Fla. – Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd held a news conference Thursday afternoon to discuss the arrest of a private school teacher accused of illegal conduct with a 15-year-old girl.
The teacher — 21-year-old Rameir Jones, of Lakeland — was arrested on Wednesday and faces charges of resisting or obstructing an officer without violence, providing false information to a law enforcement officer about a missing person and/or felon, sheltering an unmarried minor without notifying their parent(s), interfering with custody, accessory after the fact regarding a felony, contributing to the delinquency or dependency of a minor, unlawful use of a two-way communication device, authority figure soliciting/engaging in lewd conduct with a student and traveling to meet after using a computer to lure a child, court records show.
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Jones teaches grades 5-8 at Preparing the Way Academy, which Judd specified was not affiliated with the county school district. The victim did not attend the teacher’s school and was on probation for felony battery and grand theft, reportedly cutting her ankle monitor Dec. 4 and becoming a missing person.
“We learned during this investigation that she’s hanging with this school teacher, or at least is an associate or a friend of the school teacher. So now we’re to the fifth of December and we’re frantically looking for this 15-year-old girl who we believe may be in the company of not only an adult, but a school teacher,” Judd said. “So, after a lot of investigative work, at about 11:30 at night on December the fifth, our detectives go to Mossy Oak Lane — which is Rameir Jones’ address — and we say ‘Hey, we’re looking for this young lady, she’s 15, she’s a runaway, she’s endangered.’ Now, understand, at this moment in time, we’ve not attached him, you know, we just, it was a hunch. So it all came together after this.”
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Detectives searched Jones’ home at this time and the girl wasn’t inside, Judd said, but it wasn’t long before investigators heard that the girl had possibly gone to a “RJ’s” home all the same.
“They go, ‘Oh, that’s the guy that we went to earlier. That’s the school teacher. That’s the guy.’ So they go back at 6:15 in the morning, when the detectives are tired. They look him in the eye and go ‘OK dude, we’re well over this. We’ve got a 15-year-old missing girl. We have information that you went someplace and picked her up earlier in the evening, last evening. Where is she?’ He let us in the house again, and we found her, in his bed. Did you hear what I said? I didn’t stutter. In his bed,” Judd said.
The sheriff clarified that at this point in the investigation, there is no credible evidence that Jones and the girl had engaged in sex. Yet, as detectives learned more, recommended charges for Jones regarding aspects of deception, concealment and alleged grooming began to pile up, amounting to what Judd called a “litany.”
“He was hiding her in his car and he told her, ‘Turn off your cellphone so they can’t find you,’” Judd said, explaining why the earlier search of Jones’ home was a “fluke.” “So, we have charged him with a litany of charges and we have text that he was grooming her for sex, even though there’s no evidence there was sex at this time. We charged him with interfering with child custody, false information to law enforcement during the investigation, tampering, traveling to meet a minor, trespassing, everything we can think of.”
Judd added that the 15-year-old was also arrested to face charges of violating probation and cutting off a monitor.
Jones is currently in the Polk County Jail and was given a $51,000 bond Thursday afternoon, Judd said.
In the release, Judd also mentioned the recent arrest of Jerron Dunn — a 33-year-old substitute teacher at a Polk County charter school, booked into jail last month and accused of using Snapchat to sext teen students — to state, “two teachers preying on students is two too many.”
During the news conference, Judd updated Dunn’s case to announce two more alleged victims had come forward — a 20-year-old who was Dunn’s student and said they had sex with him, and an 18-year-old who said that Dunn showed inappropriate videos to them while inside a classroom — which led to Dunn being rearrested. Judd added that Dunn bonded out after the initial arrest and has since bonded out after his latest.
“So he’s not in jail, but he doesn’t learn well. If there are other victims, tell us, we want to know. Two more victims have already come forward,” Judd said.
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