News Update for 2/6/25
Upcoming roadwork will be closing a portion of Sebring Parkway. Highlands County Engineering, Road & Bridge and Traffic Ops are scheduled to work on demo and repair to two manholes starting February 25th and lasting through February 26th. The affected areas will be the eastbound lanes only of the parkway between Evergreen Street and Eastview Road. The area will be closed to traffic on both days and motorists should expect a detour route.
A Sebring man has been accused of breaking into home, wearing only a pink towel, and stealing a carton of orange juice. The strange case started when a resident on Timothy Road in Sebring, woke up to find the man in her bedroom early Sunday morning. The woman reported she then ran him out of her home. Highlands County Sheriff’s Deputies also received several other reports that morning of the man in the pink towel knocking on doors and asking for water. When authorities responded to the area in the Maranatha Village subdivision off Arbuckle Creek Road, they quickly found Clayton Thomas Davidson walking out between two homes and wearing the towel. Deputies also found an orange juice carton on the ground behind a shed of a nearby house, that a victim said she had discovered was missing from her fridge. Deputies arrested Davidson on a charge of burglary of an occupied dwelling.
An elderly woman from Central Florida is dead after she passed away overnight from injuries she sustained during an Orange County home invasion. The family of 85-year-old Lucy Pat Curl says she was taken off life support yesterday after she was hospitalized last Friday. Police say 55-year-old Ronald Davis posed as a community services officer to gain access into the victim’s Orlando home and attacked her. Davis is currently in jail without bond. A celebration of life service for Curl is scheduled for Sunday, February 16th. It will take place at the First Baptist Church of Orlando, where her husband works as a pastor.
A teen accused of murdering and kidnapping his mother in Polk County, has been found not guilty. The jury released their verdict yesterday in the case of 17-year-old Collin Griffith. He was accused of stabbing his 38-year-old mom, Catherine, to death at his grandmother’s Polk County home last September. Collin’s defense team ultimately argued that the teen acted in self-defense after his mom allegedly lunged at him with a knife. Collin was also previously accused of fatally shooting his father in Oklahoma back in 2023, but the charges were dropped.
A Central Florida police officer is accused of stalking an ex-girlfriend. Orange City Police Officer Jarmarus Brown was arrested after the woman came forward. She claims Brown tracked her last year with a GPS air tag he put in her wallet without her knowledge. He also allegedly tracked her by accessing license plate readers. Besides stalking, Brown is also charged with accessing electronic devices without proper authority.
The National Rifle Association is taking legal action against a new court ruling that it believes impacts a Florida gun law. The NRA filed an appeal earlier this week, challenging the constitutionality of a state measure that prohibits people under the age of 21 from buying rifles and shotguns. The challenge was in response to a recent federal case ruling that said a similar law in Louisiana violated the Second Amendment. A Florida attorney filed a dispute against the NRA’s appeal yesterday. The state gun law was approved by lawmakers in the wake of the deadly mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
Florida’s manatee mortality rate is continuing to decline. State wildlife officials say 565 manatees died last year. That’s well below the average of the last five years combined, which was over seven-hundred. While the data is a positive outlook, the FWC says the number of dead calves surpassed a previous record set in 2013 with more than 150 young manatees dying in 2024. The new report shows that about 30-percent of manatee deaths are caused by humans. The silver lining is that state wildlife officials were able to rescue 19 manatees impacted by the last three hurricanes. Most of them have been released back into Florida waterways.
A Central Florida airport is facing backlash from travelers over how it handles luggage. A new study by Upgraded Points found that Orlando International Airport received more luggage-handling complaints than any other major airport in the country over the course of a decade. Nearly two out of every 100-thousand passengers filed a grievance to TSA between 2013 and 2023. There were five other Florida airports that made it into the bottom ten.