Fired Keys police captain defends her tactics in telling deputy to act like a racist

A high-ranking Florida Keys detective who was fired this week for tasking a subordinate in 2017 to act like a racist cop defended her decision as a “ruse” to keep the public safe and the suspect from leaving town.

“I used language that some found offensive,” Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Penny Phelps said in a statement she submitted during a hearing held Thursday where she argued against her termination.

“It is imperative that the context of the spoken words be examined and not just the spoken words. The context matters a great deal,” she wrote in the three-page statement.

Phelps had told one of her deputies to confront the suspect and act like a racist to pressure him for information.

Sheriff Rick Ramsay fired Phelps, 59, after the hearing. He pulled her badge and gun last weekend, but did not finalize her termination until after she argued her case Thursday.

“I cannot allow the actions of one individual to undermine the hard earned trust and confidence of the public and our members that the men and women of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office work so hard every day to build and maintain,” Ramsay said in a statement Thursday.

Ramsay said he found out about the conversation, which was recorded, only after a defense attorney in the case filed a complaint against Phelps in October. A copy of the conversation was turned over to the attorney by prosecutors as part of the discovery process.

Ramsay took Phelps off the case that same month and opened an internal affairs investigation. In early December, he relieved her of her command of the Special Operations Unit, which includes major crimes and narcotics detectives.

Phelps made the remarks in a telephone conversation to one of her deputies on Nov. 20, 2017, and they were picked up by a tape recorder in the interrogation room she was sitting in with colleagues. Police were at the beginning of their investigation into the “tree house murder,” in which Matthew Bonnett, 59, had been stabbed to death three days earlier.

Police say he was coming to the aid of a woman, Paula Belmonte, 55, who was screaming from inside the tree house in which she lived on Stock Island. According to investigators, Belmonte was being held at knife point by two masked men, one of whom slashed her neck. The men ran out of the home and encountered Bonnett on the stairs, where he was fatally stabbed five times.

On Nov. 22, 2017, two men were arrested on murder charges in connection with the case — Franklin Tyrone Tucker, 48, and Rory “Detroit” Wilson, 52. Detectives say they were there to rip off Belmonte because they had heard she had cash and crack cocaine in her home.

Tucker and Wilson have both pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial, as is John Travis Johnson, 41, who cops say drove the getaway car that night.

Police suspected Wilson’s involvement early on, but they did not want to scare him off before questioning him, and they needed a positive ID. Specifically, they wanted his thumb print and photograph.

Phelps devised a plan to have a deputy pull Wilson over on his bicycle. She wanted the deputy to act like a racist to put pressure on Wilson to provide the information police wanted.

“We don’t want Detroit knowing that we know who he is,” Phelps is heard saying on the recording. “We want it to look like you’re the grumpy old man. You have nothing better to do than, you’re the white supremacist, you’re messing with the black guy who’s riding his bike.”

“I just want you to be the neo-Nazi who’s picking on the black guy riding the bike,” Phelps said.

Moments later, Phelps is heard instructing other deputies about the assignment.

“He knows his bit,” she said. “It’s the white supremacist cop picking on the poor black guy that’s riding on a bike.”

The traffic stop never happened, but the comments nevertheless came back to haunt Phelps two years later and likely will end her career.

Phelps could not be reached for comment, and her attorney did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

In her statement, Phelps said her plan was simply a way for police to accurately identify Wilson without letting him know they considered him a suspect in the murder.

“The strategy outlined a role to be played by [the deputy] to create a belief in the suspect that he was being questioned by the police for a reason other than he was a robbery/murder suspect,” Phelps wrote.

She said she wanted to prevent people from getting hurt and not give Wilson a reason to run away from the Keys. She denied being a racist in any way and said the plan was no different from undercover cops playing a role to make a case.

“As stated earlier, the ruse is the cost of keeping the public safe and bringing a murderer or murderers to justice,” she said. “It should not cost me my job.”

Ramsay declined to comment on Phelps’ statement Friday, and instead referred to a Dec. 13 memo in which he informed Phelps of his plans to fire her.

“After careful consideration of your conduct and the effect it has had on this agency and our community, I cannot, and will not, defend your actions,” Ramsay wrote.

It appears Phelps, who has served in the sheriff’s office for 18 years, may have also lost the support of at least some rank and file deputies under her command. Their union, the South Florida Police Benevolent Association, sent Ramsay a letter Dec. 12 urging him to relieve Phelps of all of her duties and assign her to work at home.

Until her termination, Phelps also headed deputy training. Union president Steadman Stahl told Ramsay in the letter that she should be relieved of that role as well.

“The PBA has gotten calls from our members employed by you with serious concerns regarding her current position as Training Director. Their well-founded concerns relate to her objectivity in her current role, and, I too, think it is wholly inappropriate for her to be in any position where she has oversight or supervision of any employee of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office,” Stahl wrote.

Phelps started working at the sheriff’s office in February 2002 and has been a cop for 37 years.

According to her statement, when Ramsay ordered her to turn in her badge, weapons and other sheriff’s office property earlier this month, he sent four deputies to her home to collect them, which she said embarrassed her in front of her neighbors.

“Four employees came to my house dressed in tactical vests Saturday morning, Dec. 14, 2019. They created quite a show for my neighbors as they posted on the corners of my house as if they were serving a high-risk warrant,” she wrote. “An eighteen-year career was packed into garbage bags and carried out of my home.”