A Florida sheriff was forced to make a heartbreaking arrest while hunting local meth suppliers — his own daughter.
Franklin County Sheriff A.J. “Tony” Smith told The Washington Post of his shock when his 38-year-old daughter Kristen Kent’s name came up when he asked a busted dealer to identify her supplier.
“I said, ‘My daughter?’ And she said, ‘Yes, sir,’” the sheriff told the paper.
While stunned, he still set up a sting that caught his daughter — a mother of three — delivering a large quantity of meth, he said. She was arrested last week for trafficking amphetamine and possessing cocaine.
“I felt terrible about it, but I also knew that the quantity of drugs she was selling was unbelievable and that she had to be stopped,” he told the DC paper.
“Did it feel good? No, it didn’t feel good, but it had to be done.”
Sheriff Smith even posted his daughter’s arrest to his department’s Facebook page, along with the hashtag #WeDontMethAround.
Franklin County Sheriff A.J. “Tony” Smith had to arrest his own daughter after she was identified as a meth supplier. Facebook/A.J. "Tony" Smith
Smith said his daughter Kristen Kent “had to be stopped” from allegedly supplying drugs. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office“Methamphetamine does not discriminate & neither do we. It does not matter who you are — No one is immune or exempt,” he wrote alongside his daughter in orange jail scrubs in her booking photo.
The sheriff said he thought his daughter had kicked a previous drug addiction after a spell in rehab.
“So it was … it was a total shock,” he told The Washington Post.
Still, he told the paper that his daughter’s troubles have only made him even more determined “to stop the drug abuse that’s going on here.”
Kent was arrested in a sting for trafficking amphetamine and possessing cocaine. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office