Interstate 75 southbound reopened shortly before noon Wednesday after law enforcement officials said a wrong-way driver caused a fatal crash along a Collier County segment of the freeway. The Florida Highway Patrol said DUI manslaughter charges have been filed against the driver, a 24-year-old women from Naples. She was traveling northbound on the southbound side of 75 when she hit two other vehicles head-on at mile marker 110 shortly after 4 a.m.

A raft of never-before-seen police reports obtained by the Florida Trident via a public records request portray Carmine Marceno Sr., who was then 67, as a stalker, bully, and thief who routinely roamed a Collier County gated community where he lived in his signature sweat pants terrorizing his neighbors.

Shortfall looms while county Tax Collector seeks 52% budget increase.

Proposals quietly moving through the Legislature would create a new counterintelligence unit in state government, echoing the FBI’s controversial COINTELPRO in the 1960s.

Collier County Sheriff's Office units have responded to a report of a small, private plane seen in the water in the Everglades.

After Sarasota County staff was preparing to deny a permit to remove protected mangroves from publicly owned shoreline along Lemon Bay in December 2023, Commissioner Ron Cutsinger pushed to have the county abandon that same land next to property he owned and a nearby parcel he later purchased, newly obtained public records show. The public land — conveyed to the county in 1998 as part of a preservation gift — later disappeared from the Property Appraiser’s public map after a meeting prompted by Cutsinger.

Hoping to position Florida as the next big destination for large and hyperscale data centers that power artificial intelligence, state lawmakers are weighing how much corporate secrecy is enough but not too much and how to manage the centers’ intensive demands for energy and water where they operate. Sen. Bryan Avila, Miami-Dade Republican, is leading the charge, saying Florida can outcompete motivated states such as Georgia, Virginia and Texas to land the multibillion-dollar projects here, creating thousands of high-tech jobs, tax revenue and related economic development.

When the U.S. Attorney’s Office closed a criminal investigation into Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno in November, Marceno issued a statement calling allegations that he engaged in a kickback scheme “completely false.” But in an undercover FBI recording obtained by the Florida Trident, Marceno, while not admitting personal involvement, is heard telling his alleged co-conspirator that he has his “back” regarding payments that may have been made and assuring him they were his “personal business” and the public had no way to discover they were made.

When Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno won the Republican primary on Aug. 18, 2020, he celebrated in a Bonita Springs hotel suite, where close colleagues and friends stood in a circle around the room as he addressed each one. Among those in the circle were fellow sheriff’s office employees like Capt. Chris Lalor, whom he called “heaven sent,” and John Holloway, who would later become his undersheriff and whom he dubbed the “brains of the operation.” But saved for the end was someone Marceno said came from “a different place,” his closest friend, 56-year-old Ken Romano, a New Jersey-raised jeweler with both the look and voice of a backroom character on "The Sopranos."

The raid at a city department was the second such action in two months.