"I’m not driving six hours to get a cheeseburger every day."
Robert Dillon has had his share of bar fights. When he wound up in jail, he detested sharing space with men who were there for committing crimes against children.
“I may come off a little abrasive, but I promise you, I got a soft spot for kids, and I got a soft spot for (the) elderly,” he told the Tampa Bay Times.
So when a deputy arrested Dillon in 2024 on charges that he tried to lure a child, the 52-year-old commercial crab fisherman from Fort Myers was devastated.
Police accused Dillon of repeatedly asking a girl under the age of 12 to leave a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s with him. An officer used facial recognition technology to link Dillon to an image of the real suspect, even though Dillon has never been to Jacksonville Beach.
This month, Dillon and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the city of Jacksonville Beach, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, two officers involved in the arrest and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.
Read more at the Tampa Bay Times