PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office arrested one of their own officers Friday, a child protection officer who allegedly filed false reports in separate cases involving children and questionable behavior by adults supervising those children.
- Taylor Martin admitted to filing false reports, claimed she was overwhelmed by workload
- Second time in 2019 that Child Protection Officer fired, criminally charged for filing false reports
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Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the false reports filed by Child Protection Officer Taylor Martin were discovered last month.
According to Gualtieri, Martin was responsible for interviewing neighbors in three separate cases involving children where the behavior of the adults supervising the children had been brought into question.
Martin reportedly filed reports giving false statements from those neighbors, who she never interviewed. When deputies noticed vague details in her reports, they went back and spoke to those neighbors.
Not only did those deputies discover that the neighbors had never been interviewed — they also learned that the neighbors' true observations regarding the subjects in each of the cases were the opposite of what Martin had written in her reports.
"It’s fair to raise the question, are these falsities, this false reports, these false narratives in the reports, are they limited to just the collateral neighbor investigations? Is there something else that she put in those things?" Gualtieri said.
"Of course we’re looking at all that," he went on, "and so far we’ve not come up with anything so far, but all of that on the table is a fair observation and it’s very concerning because by not doing her job, she could’ve very easily put kids in harm’s way."
Gualtieri said Martin, an employee of the Sheriff's Office since 2016, admitted to filing the false reports. She said she was overwhelmed by her workload leading up to her wedding and honeymoon.
Martin now faces three felony counts of falsifying records in a child protection case.