Third victim dies after South Bay crash that killed woman, two 13-year-old girls<\/a><\/p>\n“I set up a hunting trail cam to get some receipts and we found out who’s been doing it. This is Jim Gallegos at 3:58 in the morning on August 5, while biking down Palm City Road, you’ll notice the bike shorts, taking my sign out of the ground,” Collins said in the Facebook video.<\/p>\n
Collins goes on to say, he put Apple Airtags on some of the signs, and was able to pinpoint their location. He says they were at man named Jim Gallegos’ house.<\/p>\n
He says Gallegos is a campaign advisor to Merritt Matheson. <\/p>\n
Matheson is another political candidate, though not in the same race as Collins.<\/p>\n
“Listen, I don’t want to get the cops involved. Guys, bring me the signs back. I just want to play fair. Let’s have a clean election,” Collins said in the Facebook video. <\/p>\n
We met with Jim Gallegos and asked him about the accusations.<\/p>\n
“What we were doing was taking the signs down that the owner of the property had requested us to remove and that’s what we were doing. That’s what I was doing at that particular time,” Gallegos explained.<\/p>\n
Merritt Matheson sent CBS12 News a text. He says Gallegos is not his campaign advisor. Nevertheless, the story of signs being stolen prompted a man named Derreck Ogden to confront Gallegos. Ogden is also running for election to be a Stuart City Commissioner. Their argument about the campaign signs was caught on camera. <\/p>\n
“Mr. Gallegos, if you want to return the signs I don’t think the other slow-growth candidates are gonna press charges. So if you want to ask your campaign, your campaign team to return the signs,” Ogden says in a video posted on Facebook. <\/p>\n
“I never touched one of your signs! Not one! And that’s an attack on me personally!” Gallegos says in the video posted on Facebook. <\/p>\n
“While our campaign is following the rules, other campaigns are not and I think it’s important that people know that and we’re the only ones that hold anybody responsible as the residents. So we have to hold these people to, you know, their feet to the fire,” Ogden told CBS12 News.<\/p>\n
Gallegos says he no longer has the campaign signs. He says he removed about 30 campaign signs for various candidates, not just Chris Collins’ campaign, because the property owner did not want the signs on his property.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stuart, FL\/CBS12 News \u2014 We are less than a week away from the August election and we have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[171,173,172],"class_list":["post-369777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie-headlines","tag-port-st-lucie-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}