Your Florida Daily: Man charged with killing father with pickup truck, families sue developer over cemetery flooding

ORLANDO, Fla. – An elderly man is dead after being run over several times by a truck that deputies say was driven by the man’s son.

According to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, it happened Saturday night outside R Bar in Treasure Island.

Investigators learned Thomas McKeown, 86, walked up to a black Dodge Ram and appeared to fall down in front of the truck.

That’s when deputies say the truck started to move and run over McKeown, dragging him, and reversed and moved forward several times, hitting the 86-year-old before leaving the parking lot.

He later died at the hospital.

The investigation revealed that Thomas McKeown’s son, 61-year-old Mark McKeown, was driving the truck.

Mark McKeown was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of a crash involving death.

Deputies say they believe he was impaired but didn’t say why he would run over his father.

McKeown has since bonded out of jail.

Nearly 400 families sue developer over Orange County cemetery flooding

Hundreds of families with loved ones buried at an Orange County cemetery are suing after flooding so severe it caused some caskets to come out of the ground.

Flooding in 2020 and 2022 left the Tildenville Oakland Cemetery underwater.

Now, 400 families are alleging Pulte Homes, the developer of the nearby Oakleaf at Oakland subdivision, created the problem when they built a second entrance and rerouted the water.

Those families argue the damage is desecrating the final resting place of their loved ones.

The court documents do not say how much compensation those families are seeking.

Vape-detection dogs expected to be approved by school board

Lake County is turning to some four-legged help to crack down on students bringing vapes to school.

The district is set to sign off on adding a sheriff’s office dog handler specifically for vape detection for the remainder of the school year.

The dogs are specially trained to sniff out not only vapes with nicotine but also ones filled with THC and even the devices themselves.

The extra handler will cost a little more than $63,000.

Monday’s school board meeting is set for 6 p.m.

Random Florida Fact

While people often credit Willis Carrier for inventing the air conditioning, a Florida man is actually considered the father of refrigeration decades earlier.

Dr. John Gorrie was a physician in Apalachicola who thought cold air would make his patients more comfortable.

Gorrie invented a machine that produced ice from a compressor powered by a horse, water, wind-driven sails, or steam.

This machine laid the groundwork for modern refrigeration and air-conditioning and in 1851 his invention was patented.