Last Updated: 9:20 a.m.
A suspicious package found at a door of the Flagler County courthouse this morning, before the day’s proceedings began, forced a lockdown of the building and restricted access to law enforcement only. The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office’s bomb squad has been summoned, leaving the courthouse empty for now.
No one had to be evacuated from the building since no one had gone in yet. But the first of innumerable hearings was scheduled for 8:30, with Circuit Judge Terence Perkins scheduled to preside over the first one at 8:30, and Circuit Judge Chris France, County Judge Melissa Distler and County Judge Andrea Totten at 9 a.m.
“All I can tell you right now is during a standard security check before the start of the courthouse day, a suspicious package was located,” Sheriff Rick Staly said. “As a result, for precautionary reasons, the courthouse right now is closed and the chief judge and the clerk of the court have been notified.” Perkins is the chief judge, Tom Bexley is the clerk of court.
“We decided to exercise the abundance of caution and I sent all my employees home for the day,” Bexley said, though some employees have been called back and told to be ready to work, as court proceedings are expected to resume as soon as the situation is cleared by law enforcement: all judges intend to resume their scheduled hearings. As for hearings that were set for early morning, those will be rescheduled.
France was scheduled to hold injunction hearings, which typically involve urgent domestic violence or stalking situations. Perkins was scheduled to hold a sentencing and plea hearings, and two dozen probation violation hearings, among others. The county judges’ docket is no less busy.
“Nobody is going to go to jail, nobody is going to have their license suspended, we’re going to reschedule and apologize for the inconvenience,” Bexley said. “Many of the court events that were scheduled for the day will continue, but our office, the Comptroller office will be closed today, reopening tomorrow at 8:30.” Meanwhile, everyone had to wait, with hearings resuming “as soon as the building is cleared. We’re not sure how long that will take.”
“It takes a while, we don’t have a bomb squad ourselves,” Staly said of the expected arrival of the squad from St. Johns County, which is typically requested in such situations: there are one or two such incidents a year or so in Flagler County, involving either suspicious packages, ammunition or hazardous materials. The last time the bomb squad and its famous robot Frosty drove to Flagler County was to investigate what had been reported as a crate of grenades in a residential home in the Woodlands–the home of a man who had days earlier been arrested for murder. The crate turned out to be full of ammunition, but not grenades.
The Government Services Building across the street is not affected, with all business carrying on as normal there.
At the Flagler courthouse, the Sheriff’s Office deployed its own bomb-sniffing dog. The courthouse is rimmed with surveillance security cameras, and State Road 100 is an alley copiously equipped with cameras of its own, including license plate readers, so if anyone had either walked or driven in to drop a package with nefarious intentions, it was almost certain that the person, or persons, could at least be captured on video, if not their license plates read and their whereabouts located. But the sheriff was not prepared to provide any such information for now. “We have lots of technology in this county and it’s an active investigation,” Staly said.
Bexley said the hope is that this scare will follow the patterns of almost every other such scare. “We hope that nothing like that happens, this is just a routine scare that we can all respond to and move on and use this as a learning experience,” he said, with that learning experience already honed enough that when this alert was announced, everyone knew what to do. “Our response as an office is becoming a lot more precise,” he said, though it’s been many years since the courthouse, which has ample security of its own–and the only metal detectors at the entrance of any local government office building–had a lockdown.
