JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Sheriff T.K. Waters on Wednesday announced the arrest of a former police officer accused of false imprisonment and stalking his ex-girlfriend using a marked police car.
JSO said on Dec. 5, it received the complaint that a man was stalking his former girlfriend. Investigators found out that over several months, it was former Officer Claude Fleurimond following her.
The arrest report said that the woman met Claude in July 2024 while he was on duty at a gas station when he approached her and they swapped numbers.
She said they dated off and on for about a year and she blocked him when she didn’t want to talk to him.
The police report said the last time they spoke was around July 2025 when her phone was damaged and she got a new number. Before getting the new number, the woman said her actions should have shown Fleurimond that she wasn’t interested.
She said that she hadn’t seen him since she got the new number which she thought meant that he would leave her alone, but on Oct. 27, she noticed a grey BMW sitting near her work parking lot and it followed her to I-295 from Imeson Road.
She said she became nervous as the car made every lane switch as her. She then took an exit and continued driving on I-295.
The woman said two days later, a JSO patrol car parked in the same area where the BMW was followed her when she left from work and conducted a traffic stop on her using the emergency lights.
She said she didn’t know it was Fleurimond until he walked up to her passenger window and he asked her why she hadn’t answered any of his phone calls.
She said he didn’t perform any law enforcement actions during the traffic stop and had no valid reason to stop her.
The report said that she told him that she didn’t want to be involved with him and he said, “It is harder to fall out of love than it is to fall in love,” before leaving in his car.
She said she didn’t report the interaction because she didn’t know what she could do about it. She told several coworkers about what happened and others said they saw the BMW near the workplace, but didn’t think anything of it at the time.
The most recent incident happened on Dec. 4, when she was about to leave work when the BMW was nearby. A coworker took her car as bait and the BMW followed the coworker to a gas station, where the coworker recorded him and sent the video to her.
After that, she said she became scared enough to report Fleurimond to the police.
He was then arrested by integrity detectives for false imprisonment and stalking, JSO said.
“Our collective belief and openness and transparency accountability outweighs any personal allegiance to JSO employees,” Waters said. “As we have said before, no one’s above the law, especially in situations like this, if investigators find that there is probable cause to support a criminal allegation of a JSO employee after a comprehensive investigation, this agency will hold that employee accountable.”
Waters said this is the sixth arrest of a JSO employee in 2025. In 2024, former Officer Allen LeSage was arrested and accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend and improperly using a state database to run license plates outside her apartment.
“It’s one of the worst abuses of power that there is,” Crime and Safety Analyst Tom Hackney said. “You’re granted power by the agency and the sheriff and the state of Florida, and that’s for good that is not for your personal use.”
Hackney said agencies closely monitor how officers use police systems.
“There are really safeguards in place for any reason that it’s not business related, that the sheriff’s office has to take some pretty swift action, especially as it relates to the driver’s license checks,” Hackney said.
JSO hired Fleurimond on Aug. 22, 2022.