Officials: Deputy stole dead man’s pain meds
Authorities: He went to elderly man’s house, swiped 60 pills.
Jason Cooke went to suburban Boynton house where an elderly man had been taken to hospital, swiped 60 pills, authorities say.
WEST PALM BEACH — A Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputy is accused of stealing a dead man’s pain medication following a welfare check at the man’s house in the days after Hurricane Irma.
Deputy Jason Cooke took a total of 60 pills — a combination of pain pills, muscle relaxers and anti-psychotic medication — on Sept. 12 from a residence on Lombardy Street in suburban Boynton Beach, PBSO investigators said. Cooke was arrested Thursday on a warrant for burglary and grand-theft charges and made his first appearance before a judge Friday.
Judge Caroline Shepherd set Cooke’s bail at $28,000 and ordered that he be placed on in-house arrest upon his release. Cooke, 36, has worked for the sheriff ’s office full-time since 2009 and is assigned to District 6, which is west of Boynton Beach, a sheriff ’s spokeswoman said. POSTNOW
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“The Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office holds its employees to the highest standards and never forgets about its duty to preserve the public’s trust,” the sheriff ’s office said in a prepared statement released Thursday night. “Unfortunately, sometimes an employee makes a bad decision which leads to misconduct.”
Cooke has been placed on paid administrative leave. Defense attorney Stuart Kaplan said in court that the deputy recently had undergone treatment for substance abuse.
According to an arrest report made public Friday, sheriff ’s deputies responded to the home after receiving a telephone call from a man concerned about his 85-year-old father, who had weathered Hurricane Irma alone in the house, south of Gateway
Boulevard between Jog and Hagen Ranch roads. Deputies found the older man on the floor of his master bedroom. He was taken to Delray Medical Center, where he died.
Deputies were on the scene for about 15 minutes before clearing the call and returning to service, according to the report. The man’s son received an alert more than an hour later after a motion detector detected movement in the home.
Surv e illance footage
showed a deputy enter the home through the garage and go into the master bedroom. A sergeant reviewing the footage identified Cooke as the deputy, the report said.
The video footage allegedly showed Cooke walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, where he appeared to open a container and empty some- thing onto his right hand. Cooke put his hand in his pants pocket and repeated the act with a second item, the report said. He allegedly opened all of the cabinets and drawers and searched through them.
Cooke had not been assigned to the welfare check and did not have permission to enter the home, the sher- iff ’s office said. According to the report, he stole pills including Tramadol, a pain reliever, as well as the muscle relaxer Carisoprodol and prochlorperzine maleate, an anti-psychotic medicine.
Days after the incident, Cooke volunteered to be interviewed by investigators from the Violent Crimes Division. He allegedly told investigators he used the garage code that was in the dispatch log to gain entry into the home. Cooke said he was at a death investigation and recovered some medications that had not been submitted into evidence, the report said.
The d eputies who responded to the initial call told investigators that none of them had either communicated with Cooke or requested that he return to the home.