A Florida scientist says armed police pointed a gun at her children during a raid she's blamed on the state's "gestapo" Governor, accusing him and other officials of covering up the extent of the local COVID-19 outbreak.
Rebekah Jones, who developed the state's COVID-19 online dashboard, was reportedly fired by the Department of Health (DOH) in May - officially for exhibiting "a repeated course of insubordination". Jones claims it was because she refused to alter data to make the outbreak look less serious than it really was.
The same day she was fired, the state began to relax restrictions which - according to official figures - had kept the virus largely at bay, resulting in a huge wave of infections that's still ongoing.
Police raided her home on Monday (local time), guns drawn, and took computers, phones and flash drives away.
"They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint," she wrote on Twitter, with a video showing armed men demanding her husband "come down the stairs, now!"
"He just pointed a gun at my children," Jones can be heard shouting. She later implied on Twitter she might have been shot if she "weren't white".
Florida law enforcement say someone illegally sent an unauthorised group message to officials urging them to "speak up before another 17,000 people are dead", the Tampa Bay Times reports.
"You know this is wrong. You don't have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it's too late."
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Jones has denied sending the message, telling CNN she isn't "that tech savvy" and the message underplayed the number of dead - which she wouldn't do.
Instead, she thinks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis knows there is "evidence of illegal activities by the state" on her computers, and contacts she has inside the DOH who have been supplying her information.
"On my phone is every communication I have ever had with someone who works with the state who has come to me in confidence and told me things that could get them fired," she told CNN.
Since May, Jones has run an alternative COVID-19 dashboard which contains more detailed information than the one she built earlier this year, including case numbers in local schools. She told NPR the raid was retaliation.
"They took evidence of corruption at the state level. They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo."
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065787900145665
DeSantis' office denied even knowing about the raid, saying it had "no involvement, no knowledge, no nothing" of the case. Police officials said the guns weren't pointed at anybody. The video shows at least one officer pointing his gun at the top of the stairs, but it's not clear if anyone was there at the time.
Jones has not been charged with any crime. She's set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for a "hell of a good lawyer" and a new computer, which has already raised more than US$150,000. She's also looking for a "job not in Florida".
It's not her first run-in with the law. Jones is currently facing a charge of posting explicit photos of an ex-boyfriend online, and has previously been charged of robbery and criminal mischief, both charges eventually dropped.
"DeSantis needs to worry less about what I'm writing about and more about the people who are sick and dying," she told CNN. "Doing this to me will not stop me from reporting the data. Ever."
Florida has recorded 1.05 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, the third-most behind California and Texas. Official figures say 19,378 people in the state have now died, the fourth-highest death toll behind Texas, California and New York, the latter hit hard early in the pandemic when there were few known treatments.
Jones' new tracker has recorded a few dozen more deaths, but considerably more infections recorded - 1.15 million.
