By Matt Wiley | August 13
A Wesley Chapel man has been released, after turning himself in for being illegally in the possession of a sea turtle.
According to a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) report, Kim Raymond Feaste, 21 — whose permanent address is in the Williamsburg community of Wesley Chapel (just north of the Hillsborough-Pasco county line) — turned himself in to the Orient Rd. jail in Tampa on September 1, after Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) authorities visited his apartment the day before.
“(FWC) had put out a news release with his photograph, asking for the public’s help identifying him,” says FWC spokesperson Gary Morse. “As a result, we received a significant number of calls to the FWC Alert Hotline and we were able to determine his name and his whereabouts.”
The FWC release, dated August 13, describes a photographer’s encounter with Feaste, who was photographed digging in a Loggerhead sea turtle (which is classified as an “endangered” species by the International Union for Censervation of Nature, or IUCN) nest on Casey Key in Sarasota County. When asked what he was doing, Feaste replied that he was “collecting turtle eggs to be released when they hatched.”
Morse says that there was plenty of evidence at Feaste’s apartment, located in downtown Tampa, to determine that he was, indeed, the man they were looking for.