Florida Police Raid Home of Fired State COVID-19 Data Scientist

Florida police on Monday raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the former coronavirus data scientist who built the state’s COVID-19 dashboard before being fired in May over what she has said was her refusal to “manipulate data.”

“They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,” Jones wrote in a tweet regarding the raid on Monday evening.

About ten officers with guns drawn raided her home in Tallahassee at around 8:30 a.m., Jones told CNN, as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement worked to execute a search warrant as part of an investigation into whether the data scientist accessed a state government messaging system without authorization to encourage employees to speak out about coronavirus deaths, according to an affidavit obtained by the network. 

“It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” the November 10 message said, according to the affidavit. “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”

While officials traced the message to an IP address connected to Jones’ house, she maintains she has not improperly accessed the state messaging system and that she no longer had access to her government computer accounts after her firing.

Jones posted a video on social media of the raid, taken from a camera in her house, showing an officer pointing a gun up a set of stairs as the data scientist warned her two children were upstairs. She said the officer pointed his gun at her 2-year-old daughter, 11-year-old son, and her husband.

She said officers also “pointed a gun six inches from my face” and took all of her “hardware and tech” including her computers, phone and flash drives that she says contained “proof that (state officials) were lying in January about things like internal reports and notices from the CDC” and “evidence of illegal activities by the state.” She said that she accessed those reports legally and some had been sent to her by other people after she was removed from her position.

Rick Swearingen, the law enforcement department’s commissioner, said in a statement that “at no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”

A spokesperson for the department said agents knocked on Jones’ door and called her “in an attempt to minimize disruption to the family.” She declined to open the door for 20 minutes and hung up on the agents, and her family was upstairs when agents did enter the house, the spokesperson added.

Jones told CNN that she did not send the message, as she is “not a hacker” and it had undercounted the number of deaths by about 430, which she says she “would never” have done.

She has accused Governor Ron DeSantis of orchestrating the raid as she has been outspoken in her criticism of his handling of the pandemic.

A spokesperson for the governor says the governor’s office “had no involvement, no knowledge, no nothing, of this investigation” and that the investigation had been launched before the message had been connected to Jones.

While Jones has argued that she was fired after refusing to comply with a superior at the Florida Department of Health’s request to manipulate the state’s data to show Florida as closer to meeting its reopening targets than it was, state officials have said she was removed after exhibiting “a repeated course of insubordination,” making “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

In July, Jones filed a whistleblower complaint against the health department, requesting that she be reinstated to her job with back pay. She also began her own online dashboard of state coronavirus data, which she said she ran on one of the computers officers took on Monday.

Last year she was charged with stalking after allegedly posting explicit photos of an ex-boyfriend online. She told CNN the case, which is still pending, involves a blog post she made in an online group for women who had been in abusive relationships. A lawyer for Jones on Sunday filed a motion to withdraw from the case after learning “an immediate family member is involved in an active investigation” of Jones. He did not provide any details on that investigation.