A Highlands County Sheriff’s deputy wanted on a domestic rape charge has been arrested in South Florida — where he’d been deployed to serve in a Florida National Guard unit.
David Warren Ray, 39, was booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center over the weekend. An arrest warrant had been issued by a judge in Highlands County, which is about 100 miles south of Orlando.
Ray was arrested at Provident Doral hotel on Friday night by local police, according to an arrest report.
The Florida National Guard has been particularly busy over the past year, with deployments to South Florida and other parts of the state to help with COVID-19 testing sites and duties, not to mention stints in Tallahassee and Washington D.C. for security related to political unrest and the presidential inauguration.
Guardsman have been on hand to help run the walk-up vaccination site at Miami-Dade College’s North Campus.
Ray, a sergeant first class with the Army’s 116th Field Artillery Regiment, had been in South Florida since January to help with COVID-19 response efforts, according to a Department of Military Affairs spokesman. He was scheduled to end his deployment at the end of March.
A spokesman for the Highlands County Sheriff’s department said it would release details about the allegations and the investigation Monday afternoon.
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