Dedorius Varnes, Ex-Flagler Sheriff’s Deputy, Gets 19 Months in Prison for ‘Disgusting’ Stalking

Varnes, 30, arrested for stalking and harassing two Palm Coast residents in separate, bizarre incidents that stretched over months in 2020, was sentenced this afternoon to 19.5 months in prison followed by three years’ probation.

Varnes had abused his authority as a law enforcement officer to trace down residents’ private information then obsessively and luridly harass, insult and threaten them, at times using racist invectives. He was insulted and threatened in turn, and called the N-word by one of the victims (Varnes is Black, his victims are white), bringing him back him, as his attorney Michael Lambert put it, to his youth in Palatka when “he reverted to the way he was raised,” in an environment where provocation meant standing up and fighting.

The difference in these cases was that Varnes was the one provoking, not the other way around, and Varnes had a law enforcement shield and weapon. Varnes was the assailant.

Circuit Judge Terence Perkins rejected Lambert’s call for further mercy: the sentence was already at the lowest end of the guidelines, though both sides had waived the floor: it could have gone lower. Varnes and his wife, who made a statement to the court, had hoped for probation or house arrest, without prison time. He has three children. He is their support, and helps his mother make ends meet.

But the crimes he committed were too grave.

“This isn’t just bullying. This isn’t just harassing. It’s not improper, it’s illegal. It’s against the law and it’s against the law for a really good reason,” Perkins said.

The judge said he accepted that there could be underlying racial issues. But “that’s not really the feature of the case for me,” he said. “As unfair as this may be, we entrust our law enforcement officers with the fair and proper treatment of the weakest, the frailest, the most vulnerable in our population. That’s what we trust them to do. That’s why we entrust them with special powers. That’s why we entrust them with firearms when no one else can do that. That’s why we give credibility to their affidavits and body cam footage and all that. And so I think that’s important. This case for me was not so much a racial case because I didn’t see those components of it. This is an issue where a police officer has abused a very sacred trust that our community puts in all law enforcement.”

“The conduct is outrageous, just not something you’d expect from a law enforcement officer,” Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark said, arguing for the 19.5 months. “We expect more, and I think we should expect more” from a law enforcement officer.”

Varnes’s sentence also means he will never be a law enforcement officer again: he had to surrender his law enforcement certificate. He is barred from owning or carrying weapons. He will have to attend anger management, a victim awareness program and a mental health evaluation and completion of whatever program is recommended.

As the judge was competing the listing of the sentence a bailiff handcuffed Varnes and ushered him to the fingerprinting station to fingerprint every finger on both hands, as required of felons entering the state prison system. His wife, a few benches behind him in the courtroom, wept. The Flagler County Sheriff’s Jorge Fuentes, lead detective in one of the two cases against Varnes, was also in the courtroom. He had testified for the prosecution.

The victim in the case Fuentes investigated had received 53 phone calls from Varnes between March and May 2020. Varnes would tell him he was watching him, was going to beat him up, was going to take money from him. Varnes, Fuentes said, used racial slurs against him. Varnes, even today, did not concede to making all 53 calls, though he said he made some.




Lambert raised questions about both victim, attempting to show one as being drunk most of the time and the other as being racist, provoking Varnes and egging him on to keep texting. The victim made threats, using the N-word and threatening to catch him and “cut your throat.”

Varnes, questioned by Lambert, said he himself committed a “complete error of judgment on my part but it got to the point where he disrespected me as a man.” So Varnes’s messages then became vile. Using tasteless language, he threatened to come by the man’s house to have sex with his wife. Lambert described Varnes’s texts as “childish, guttural, immature, disgusting.” Varnes agreed. But the victim also texted him that he was funny, and that he liked Varnes, only to revert to making threats, and finally telling Varnes to stop.

Varnes did not stop. Lambert told the judge he was disturbed by one of the victims leveling racist slurs, and at one point in his closing Lambert referred to “Black Like Me,” the 1961 non-fiction book by John Howard Griffin, a journalist who purposefully darkened his skin and traveled in the Deep South to experience the life of a Black man. He did it for six weeks, then couldn’t take it anymore. Lambert was attempting to place his client’s case in a larger context, at one point briefing the court on the N-word’s uniquely slashing power with no equivalent against whites.

“They’re very special people, but they’re also human beings,” Lambert said of police officers. “We’re all human beings, we’re frail because of it, we make bad decisions and we have to live with them.” But his argument didn’t carry.

At one point as Lambert questioned Varnes, Varnes artfully changed the sequence of events involving his victims, minimizing the extent to which he had provoked the confrontations and the lawbreaking. But as Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark got him to acknowledge, Varnes was the one at fault however he tried to cast himself in a better light.




Varnes, for his part, apologized.

“I just want to say I am truly sorry,” Varnes said when his lawyer gave him an opportunity to address his two victims, who were not in the courtroom. Varnes said he was sure they would read his apology somewhere, and went on to say that no matter how he felt at the time, he had no right to act the way he did. He called it “a complete error on my behalf, bad judgment on my behalf. That’s not who I am. I am better than that. I just hope they can accept that.”

Judge Perkins had spoken for most of those who’d followed the case over the past two years when he’d prefaced his sentence by admitting perplexity. “This is a troubling case on a number of levels,” he said. “For me personally, I kept scratching my head, I would read the 707, what is going on here? What am I missing?” A 707 is a charging affidavit filed by law enforcement with the court. It details the case from law enforcement’s perspective. Read the two Varnes 707s here and here.

Perkins continued: “What’s the element that’s going to cause this? And honestly, I didn’t figure it out. I never did figure it out. Even today as closely as I’ve listened to both of you and testimony, Mr. Varnes, I’m not sure I’m any closer to figuring it out.”