Florida
Florida Says Execution Shouldn't Be Stayed for Parkinson's Symptoms
Florida
Florida girls kidnapped by man they met on Roblox: MCSO
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff’s Office
INDIANTOWN, Fla. – Two missing Florida girls are back home and a 19-year-old man from Nebraska is behind bars after deputies say he kidnapped them after they met on the gaming app Roblox.
What we know:
According to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded to a service call around 8 p.m. regarding a pair of missing sisters who were 12 and 15 years old.
Family members told deputies that the girls went to a park in Indiantown around 9 a.m. that morning. They were brought back home and their cell phones were taken away as punishment.
The sisters’ family told deputies that the girls may be with someone they had been communicating with on Snapchat.
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The deputies saw that the SnapChat app was deleted from the girls’ phone so they reloaded the app on the phone and saw conversations between the girls and the suspect.
Those conversations revealed that the suspect, later identified as 19-year-old Hser Mu Lah Say, was on his way to Indiantown to pick up the girls and leave.
“We were dealing with a type of abduction,” Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek stated. “We know these girls went willingly, but their age suggested that they had been taken and were probably being removed from our area. That didn’t stop us, however, from searching local motels, local areas, local parks trying to find these young girls. It was literally freezing in Indiantown that night. We were in full crisis mode.”
Dig deeper:
Budensiek said the communication between the girls and the man began in the summer of 2025 on the gaming app Roblox and then eventually moved to Snapchat.
Family said they noticed strange things like gifts, specifically food, showing up to the house.
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Detectives pieced together a timeline and said the suspect left Omaha, Nebraska on Friday morning and drove straight through to Indiantown, arriving on Saturday around 10 a.m.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff’s Office
Initially, investigators said the girls planned to meet him at the park, but they were taken back home, and their phones were taken away.
They learned that the suspect was taking I-75 to head back to Nebraska, so the detectives contacted the Florida Highway Patrol and the Georgia State Police.
“There’s nothing good with a grown man coming into the state of Florida, removing two teenage girls, troubled teenage girls, taking them to Omaha, Nebraska,” Budensiek stated.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff’s Office
The Georgia State Police pulled the vehicle over and took Lah Say into custody and rescued the girls.
The sheriff noted that the girls were found about five minutes before an Amber Alert was issued for them. He said if it was sent out earlier, the suspect would know the information law enforcement had on him, including details about his car and where they believed he was headed with the girls.
READ: Body found inside truck submerged in Plant City pond during search for missing man: HCSO
What they’re saying:
“In this case, I think we prevented something disastrous,” Budensiek said. “Do we know what would have happened? No, none of us do, but we went through the devices we had available to us at the time. We’ve not seen anything explicit, necessarily, but the suspect was repeatedly warning these young girls that he could get into a lot of trouble for what he was about to do. He knew he was violating the law. We knew that if we didn’t find those girls in a timely manner and everyone did not do what they did to find these girls, they would be in Omaha, Nebraska, missing.”
Lah Say has been charged with two counts of kidnapping and two counts of interference with child custody.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff’s Office
What’s next:
Lah Say is awaiting extradition back to Martin County.
The Source: This article was written with information posted online by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office and presented during a press conference.
Florida
South Florida farmers warn that freezing temperatures could lead to higher prices in the market as they brace for crop losses
South Florida farmers are assessing damage after freezing temperatures swept across the region early Monday morning, with growers warning that the cold could soon lead to higher prices for fruits and vegetables.
At Kern Carpenter Nursery, owner Kern Carpenter said nearly 20% of his tomato crop was damaged by the overnight freeze.
“The wind died, and it got cold really fast. We did the best we could and still got burned,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter is not alone. Sam Accursio, a green bean farmer in South Florida, shared a video with CBS News Miami showing frost covering his plants just before sunrise.
“These plants were just like an ice cube. You could go up to them, and the leaves were crunchy,” Accursio said.
Accursio and his workers began watering crops before 1 a.m. in an effort to prevent frost damage, but hundreds of plants were still affected.
With another cold night in the forecast, farmers are preparing for more potential losses.
“They’re saying upper 30s, low 40s. We’re hoping we don’t have to crank up anything again,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter added that excess watering can also harm crops, creating another challenge for farmers trying to protect their fields.
At Robert Is Here, a popular South Florida fruit market established in 1959, shoppers may soon feel the impact.
Asked whether prices could increase, owner Robert Moehling Jr. said consumers should expect changes.
“100% you are going to feel it in the market. With the frost, it can cause damage, and having continuous days of frost makes it worse,” he said.
Accursio says green bean prices are especially vulnerable.
“In this particular case, the lack of product will probably drive the price up,” he said.
Despite the losses, some farmers say South Florida could help offset shortages caused by freeze damage in North and Central Florida.
Carpenter said he has already seen tomato prices rise and believes additional cold could make things worse.
“I would think in the next few weeks the prices would go up,” he said.
Farmers say they will need 48 to 72 hours to fully assess the extent of the damage and are still bracing for the impact of another cold night.
Florida
Marijuana petition group calls Florida ruling ‘premature’
Smart and Safe Florida was looking to get an adult-use recreational marijuana amendment on the 2026 ballot.
Recreational use to public smoking: Florida’s marijuana bills for 2026
Florida’s push for marijuana reform heats up as lawmakers consider a record 12 new bills for 2026.
A petition group pushing to get recreational marijuana on Florida’s 2026 November statewide ballot is saying the state’s announcement of its failure to gather enough signatures is “premature.”
Secretary of State Cord Byrd announced Feb. 1 that all 22 citizen-led proposed amendments to the state’s constitution failed to meet Florida law’s signature requirements.
Smart and Safe Florida, the group behind adult-use recreational pot, pushed back.
“We believe the declaration by the Secretary of State is premature, as the final and complete county by county totals for validated petitions are not yet reported,” a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Florida said. “We submitted over 1.4 million signatures and believe, when they are all counted, we will have more than enough to make the ballot.”
The group needed to have met 880,062 signatures by Feb. 1, but the Florida Division of Elections website only listed 783,592 verified signatures. For months, the number was slowly trickling upward, since the group had more than 662,000 verified in November.
The pot group faced several challenges while seeking to get its petition on the ballot, all stemming from a law the governor approved last year (HB 1205). It brought stricter penalties and deadlines for petition groups, and with it came increased costs to verify petitions by supervisors of elections, effectively making it more costly to gather signatures.
The law is currently being challenged in federal court by a number of petition groups, including Smart and Safe Florida, saying it restricts core political speech. A trial begins Feb. 9.
The law went into effect July 1; a federal judge agreed one provision restricting nonresidents and noncitizens from volunteering from gathering signatures would “impose a severe burden on political expression.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled that state officials couldn’t enforce that part, but a divided appeals court promptly upheld the law, disagreeing with arguments of free speech violations.
But that’s just one hurdle.
Smart and Safe Florida also was entangled in another lawsuit alleging that Byrd violated state-required procedures and was blocking the group’s ballot measure. They also filed against Byrd on a separate issue, accusing him of seeking to invalidate 200,000 petitions without legal basis, but a circuit judge sided with him.
The DeSantis administration had continually lambasted the marijuana proposal when it was on the ballot in the 2024 elections. He held events condemning the ballot measure and contended that Florida lawmakers wouldn’t be able to set guidelines on marijuana use after it passes.
More recently, Florida’s attorney general escalated its fight against the recreational pot campaign, by accusing Smart and Safe Florida of submitting fraudulent petitions and failing to inform law enforcement. The group countered, saying they complied with state law and reported any suspicions to the Secretary of State’s office.
Attorney General James Uthmeier reacted tongue-in-cheek on social media shortly after Byrd’s announcement, posting a GIF that looked like the opening of a Looney Tunes cartoon, but instead saying, “You hate to see it!”
This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Stephany Matat is based in Tallahassee, Fla. She can be reached at SMatat@gannett.com. On X: @stephanymatat.
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