An inmate held at the Polk County, Fla., Jail on burglary charges tried to arrange the murder of a sheriff's deputy and now faces having 30 years added to his sentence, Sheriff Grady Judd said.
The State Attorney's office last week charged Kevin Snow, 18, with solicitation to commit first-degree murder. According to sheriff's investigators, Snow wanted Deputy Heather Mundell murdered because she had charged Snow with 12 felonies in connection with a string of burglaries.
Snow is accused of soliciting another Polk County Jail inmate to murder Mundell.
Sheriff's officials said Snow told the other inmate that his girlfriend had been following Mundell to determine where she lived, her schedule, what kind of car she drove and other details about her life.
Snow offered the inmate $5,000 to arrange Mundell's murder, sheriff's spokesman Michal Shanley said, and he asked that Mundell be murdered at night and her death made to look like it occurred during a robbery.
The second inmate reported the threat to authorities. Working with sheriff's officials, the inmate told Snow to contact an undercover deputy posing as a hit man. "The undercover detective was contacted and solicited to commit the murder of Deputy Mundell," a report said.
Shanley said the investigation showed that Snow's girlfriend and mother helped him make a series of three-way phone calls. Snow would call his girlfriend, who would then place a call to additional participants in the plot, according to Shanley.
The girlfriend and mother have not been charged in the case, but the investigation is continuing, Shanley said. Sheriff Judd said Snow's mother worked for an insurance company and used her work computer to look up information on the deputy, and also tried to look up information on the prosecutor and judge in the case.
She said Snow first threatened her in August 2004, when she went to interview him at the Polk Youth Development Center. Snow was 17 at the time, and he was there because Mundell had arrested him on a charge of shooting at a vehicle.
Mundell was conducting a follow-up investigation on a series of burglaries in which Snow was a suspect and had been threatened by him.
Because of the threat, the Sheriff's Office had Mundell moved from her house and arrested a man who was involved in the case, she said.
Mundell said she thought it was all over with, but in September, a supervisor at the Sheriff's Office told her that another threat had been made on her life, and she again moved from her home.
Snow is being held without bail on the solicitation to commit murder charges.