A Villages High School alumnus has been sentenced in a 2020 drug arrest that prompted her termination from her job as a clinical research assistant at the University of South Florida.
Monica Racy, 23, was sentenced earlier this month in Sumter County Court to five years probation to include two years of the stricter community control. She will also lose her driver’s license for six months.
Racy had reportedly been on the way to her mother’s house on April 19, 2020 when her speeding vehicle was pulled over on County Road 462. The Sumter County sheriff’s deputy who searched her vehicle found cocaine, 60 bags of hallucinogenic mushrooms, two bags of marijuana, methamphetamine and pills including Alprazolam and Amphetamine. There were also LSD and three packages of a Nerds THC candy “clearly labeled as containing the controlled substance THC,” the arrest report said.
At the time of her arrest, Racy confided in the deputy that she had been “transporting the illicit narcotics for a friend to Sumter County from Tampa,” the report said.
“She advised illicit narcotics sales were down in the USF area due to the COVID-19 restrictions in Hillsborough County,” the deputy wrote in the report.
Racy said she was supposed to deliver the controlled substances to friends of hers while she was in Sumter County and “take money back to her friend in Tampa.”
In a lengthy letter to Villages-News.com in the wake of her arrest, Racy claimed the drugs found in the vehicle were not hers and she was “in the wrong place and the wrong time.”
She claimed the news coverage of her arrest prompted her termination from her job at USF.
“I was terminated from my Clinical Research Assistant role today because of your article that provided misinformation and violated my privacy. My mission is to help others suffering from Diabetes Mellitus and now that is ripped away from me,” said the native of Grand Rapids, Mich. in her letter to Villages-News.com.
Racy, who previously worked at Properties of The Villages, described herself as a “college student that just got into graduate school, and I plan to pursue a career in Humanitarian Relief, Global Disaster Management, and Homeland Security.”