Lawsuit blames Lexington County for Florida woman’s wrongful cruise ship arrest
Police pulled a Florida woman off a Bahamas-bound cruise ship after the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department took out six warrants for her arrest. The department got it wrong, she alleged in a recently filed lawsuit.
Rebecca Rego, 25, who lives in Florida, had never been to South Carolina, her lawsuit said, when a Lexington County Sheriff’s Department investigator, Jason Jones, began looking into a case of vehicle theft and a subsequent string of credit card fraud. A less-than-two-week investigation led Jones to Rego. In November 2024, she was arrested while aboard a cruise ship with her family and held for 10 days before being transported to the Lexington jail.
In a lawsuit filed in Lexington County Sept. 8, 2025, Rego, whose arrest was exonerated two days after her arrival to the jail, accuses the sheriff’s department of negligence, malicious prosecution, false arrest, and violations of both her civil rights and the Freedom of Information Act.
The lawsuit stemmed from an investigation into vehicle theft and credit card fraud that took place on May 21, 2021, according to an arrest warrant affidavit included in the complaint. While Sharon Boozer, of Ridgeville, S.C., was visiting Saluda Shoals Park along Bush River Road, someone broke into her black 2017 Cadillac Escalade and stole $300 in cash, six credit or debit cards and a $2,000 Louis Vuitton wallet, according to police investigation documents included in the lawsuit’s filings.
Her credit and debit cards were then used to spend more $8,000 at three stores: Best Buy, Foot Locker and Dillard’s. Jones, the investigator, collected surveillance footage from the businesses and got a phone number from one business that said the customer had given their phone number to the store to make a purchase. That led Jones to a list of five names or addresses linked to that number. Rego’s was one.
A week after beginning the investigation, Jones made a note in the incident log that he needed to request a copy of Rego’s license from police in Florida. After getting back Rego’s license on June 1, 2021, Jones compared surveillance footage to Rego’s license photo. He sought the opinions of other deputies and five agreed he had a match so Jones issued six warrants for her arrest, according to the investigation documents.
The case was administratively closed, but still listed as an ongoing investigation, according to a case status change logged in February 2022. All the while, Rego was still in Florida. She’d just graduated college and helped her family buy a home, according to her lawsuit. Four days after she stepped onto a Royal Caribbean cruise ship in November 2024, federal agents boarded the cruise ship on its return to port and arrested her.
After being extradited to South Carolina in late November, her attorneys presented evidence which exonerated her, the lawsuit read. She was released back into the custody of her family on Nov. 27, 2024, 12 days after her arrest.
When asked questions about whether Jones faced consequences for the wrongful arrest, and whether he was still with the department, Lexington County Sheriff’s Department Spokesperson Adam Myrick confirmed that Jones was still with the county. Jones, who was appointed as a deputy in 2005, had been promoted to an investigator role in August 2019, according to the department’s website.
Myrick did not immediately provide information about whether the theft case was ever solved after Rego’s charges were exonerated.
The department declined to answer additional questions about the lawsuit, noting that it does not comment on pending litigation in an email to The State.
The suit isn’t the first time the county’s sheriff’s department has been accused of getting the wrong person. In 2019, the department was ordered to pay $200,000 to a woman it wrongfully accused of stealing around $50 from a Walmart in Red Bank.
Tom Winslow, the Pawley’s Island-based attorney for for Rego, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
