Ex-Commissioner Pat McGuire, on Sex-Offender Probation, Granted Permission for Vegas Birthday Trip

Patrick McGuire, a Flagler County commissioner from 2001 to 2004–he was known as Pat–and  a former director of the Central Florida Police Benevolent Association, was found guilty of molesting two adopted daughters and sentenced to prison in 2007. He served 52 months of a 60-month sentence, was released in October 2011, and has been serving a 10-year felony probation term since. As a sex offender, his travel, Internet access and contact with minors is severely restricted, including travel out of county, and he must abide by a curfew. He lives on Raemoor Drive in Palm Coast.

Two years ago Circuit Judge Raul Zambrano denied a request to relax his Internet access and travel restrictions, and was denied unsupervised visitations with a grandchild. In July, Judge J. David Walsh relaxed the Internet restrictions slightly—for banking and business purposes, as McGuire owns a business—but keeping in place a ban on access to social sites and giving his probation officer warrantless access to his computers.

In mid-November, McGuire petitioned circuit court for permission to travel to Las Vegas for a week. Walsh granted the motion last Thursday, on a condition that McGuire catches up with penalty costs associated with his probation.

In his petition to the court for permission., McGuire wrote that he was in the process of buying a house, of getting married by 2017 “if not before,”  and that he was looking to take a vacation with his fiancée. “I also assure you that I would conduct myself out of state exactly as I have during the past four years that I have here in Flagler County and obviously would adhere to any conditions the court would impose in order to make this trip during my birthday.” (He turns 54 next Jan. 22.)

A more formal motion for permission to amend his probation described McGuire as a “model probationer and a productive member of society, operating a successful commercial cleaning business employing nine employees.”  When he travels, he will be restricted to within one hour’s travel distance from Las Vegas and will be required to abide by his curfew terms even at the hotel-casino where he plans on staying (Likely the D Hotel and Casino,” he wrote), though the curfew is waived for the flight times.

McGuire had a fiery, checkered tenure on the county commission after winning the seat in 2000, facing conflict with his own police union and with Jim Manfre, who was in his first term as sheriff at the time (Manfre and McGuire have since become allies, with McGuire advocating for Manfre’s jail-deferment and prevention programs). In one case he wrote an apology over actions he’d taken that had led to the resignation of Hutch King as chairman of the commission. He lost to Jim O’Connell in 2006 by a significant margin. After he left public office, he took on then-State Attorney John Tanner, seeking to have Tanner investigated (in an issue stemming from the jailing of Tanner’s daughter on charges that would eventually be dropped and elicit apologies from the sheriff’s office).

He was arrested in January 2007 after two daughters he had adopted—one was 16, one was 24 when they were interviewed by authorities—told police that McGuire had repeated molested both when one was between 8 and 9 and the other between 12 and 13. The victims accused him of making one of them watch pornography on the home computer, making the younger girl skinny dip in the pool at home then telling her to masturbate, and forcing sex acts on the older girl, and asking her to flash truckers in one instance. The incidents stopped when the older girl confronted him when she was 16, but three years later, when she believed she was having “an online affair with a young male,” according to McGuire’s arrest report, she later found out that the male was McGuire. The severe computer restrictions are partly an outgrowth of those acts.