FALCON swoops up fugitives
A sweeping fugitive roundup paid off locally last week when lawmen with temporary “special authority” caught a suspected sex offender hiding with his new girlfriend.
Edward Eugene “Bobby” Harrison, 41, was arrested Aug. 21 during Operation FALCON — Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally — a task force of local lawmen and U.S. Marshals.
“It’s just something that you couldn’t do without the help of everybody,” said Deputy U.S. Marshal Dominic Guadagnoli, coordinator of the North Florida Violent Fugitive Task Force.
“We’re all happy to have this done.”
Each fugitive targeted in the roundup had been classified as a violent felon.
Just before the weeklong operation began, local lawmen were sworn in as special deputy U.S. marshals — unleashing them to make arrests with “broader jurisdictional authority,” according to a U.S. Marshals news release.
Harrison was charged with lewd and lascivious molestation in connection with an incident earlier this year.
A girl told investigators in May that Harrison molested her at least four times when she was between 6 and 8 years old.
She said he was “a big man and she was scared of him” when he would lock her in a bear hug and molest her, according to Harrison’s offense report.
She also told investigators she watched him hit and choke her mother, “which made her more afraid of him.”
Lawmen sought Harrison for questioning. Four days after the girl’s report, he called an officer to set up an interview date and ask for a reminder phone call.
He never showed up at the interview or at work, where his employer said he disappeared “on his way to do a paint job,” according to the report.
Lawmen tracked him from Fort Walton Beach to Selma, Ala., and back to two different addresses in Wright, where they caught him slipping out the back door of his girlfriend’s house on the second day of Operation FALCON.
Guadagnoli said U.S. Marshals hadn’t broken down the arrests county-by-county, but that Okaloosa, Santa Rosa and Walton counties had submitted “probably 200” arrest warrants during the combined effort.
Throughout the U.S. Marshals’ 23-county north Florida district, lawmen arrested 210 fugitives in what Okaloosa County sheriff ’s spokeswoman Cathy Rodriguez called “a good week.”
Harrison was one of 19 suspected sex offenders arrested.
U.S. Marshal Dennis Williamson said in a news release that lawmen were rounding up “society’s worst of the worst” and will continue cooperating to track fugitives across jurisdictions.