Teen Accused Of Impersonating Police Officer Back In Custody
MIAMI (CBSMiami) - A Central Florida teen already facing charges that he impersonated a physician's assistant was arrested for a second time in South Florida.
Matthew Scheidt was arrested by Homestead police officers, just hours after he was released on $11-thousand bail from the Miami-Dade County Jail.
He was first arrested Thursday on Miami Beach on charges of impersonating a Miami Beach police officer and carrying a concealed firearm.
After he posted bail, an Osceola judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Scheidt, considered a fugitive in Osceola County, was taken into custody in Homestead and booked back into the Miami-Dade County jail early Friday morning.
The teen, who lives in Orlando with his mother, was 17 in August when he was arrested after he was found at the Osceola Regional Medical Center allegedly posing as a medical assistant. Police said he had been working in the Emergency Room for a few days, after convincing someone at the hospital to issue him an access badge.
Thursday morning, Scheidt was found early Thursday morning on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, driving what appeared to a cop to be an undercover police car, typing on a laptop computer in the front seat. When the officer, who was not in a marked police car, pulled alongside the car, he said the driver looked at him and asked why he wasn't wearing a seat belt.
The Miami Beach cop said the driver, later identified as Scheidt, told him he was a police officer for Miami Beach. When a second officer arrived, the police arrest form claims Scheidt admitted he was not a cop, and told police he had no weapons in the car.
That story fell apart when police searched the car and found the teen was packing. According the arrest report, Scheidt had a fully loaded pistol under the seat, a Taser ready to use, handcuffs, and an Osceola County Sheriff's shirt. Police also recovered an Osceola County Sheriff's badge, police type radios, and other police-type gear.
That's when the fake cop was taken into custody by the real cops, and charged with impersonating a police officer and two counts of carrying a concealed weapon.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Scheidt has a long history of impersonation. As a teen, he was bounced from a Police Explorer program for repeatedly wearing police equipment in public, according to the newspaper.
The report also said Scheidt tried to lie about his age in his early teens to serve as a hospital volunteer.
While he was working as a physician's assistant at the Osceola county hospital, officials found he had allegedly done patient examinations, restrained some unruly patients, and even performed CPR, correctly, on a patient who later died of an overdose.
Following the discovery of his impersonation, the hospital was investigated and last week, a state report criticized personnel management policies because nobody checked out the teen before giving him a badge. The incident, which made national headlines, caused major changes at the hospital.
Scheidt is awaiting trial in Osceola on two counts of impersonating a physician assistant and four counts of practicing medicine without a license. A hearing for the Osceola case is set for March 6.
