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Officer Simones, 2008 Officer of the Year

Detective Simones has been named Bellevue Police Department's 2008 Officer of the Year. Detective Simones was nominated by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Bob Wood. Detective Simones was selected due to his thorough investigative work which lead to the federal indictment of 21 suspects for conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine. Simones worked with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and testified in front of a federal grand jury.

In late November of 2007, a patrol officer took a report of a suspect who made a suspicious purchase of one box of pseudoephedrine. Based upon this initial report, personnel from the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) initiated an investigation. SIU soon realized that they had multiple groups of people making large numbers of suspicious purchases of pseudoephedrine.

After identifying some of the suspects, Det Simones started to work with an investigator from the Cass County Sheriff’s Office and a Detective from the Plattsmouth Police Department. Detective Simones organized surveillance of the primary suspect and other suspects as they were identified. These surveillance operations allowed us to discover where the suspect was "cooking" his meth, where the suspects were obtaining their pseudo, and where he and his co-conspirators were storing some of their equipment.

Toward the end of the investigation, Det Simones and the other two investigators wrote search warrants for 11 locations in Cass County. The warrants were written in Sarpy County Court and Det Simones was co-affiant. He then worked on organizing an operation involving a large number of people to serve all of the warrants in one day. Over 60 law enforcement officers from the Bellevue Police Department, Cass County Sheriff’s Office, Plattsmouth Police Department, South Metro SWAT Team, and the DEA assisted with the warrants.

After the search warrants were served, Det Simones worked with the US Attorney’s Office to have 10 suspects federally indicted for conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine. Det Simones was the only officer to testify in front of the federal grand jury. The warrants were issued and during a warrant sweep in March, eight of the suspects were arrested in one day.

Without the work of Det Simones, this case would not have been possible. It is his job to investigate narcotics cases, but he went well beyond what was expected of him in working this case. He turned one suspicious purchase of pseudo into a total of 21 federal indictments to date. The mandatory minimum sentence for each of these suspects is at least five years in federal prison. Many of the suspects will be sentenced to longer terms in prison.

This case continued for several months and many more suspects have been federally indicted because of Det Simones’ diligence. Det Simones is also recognized a team leader for the Swat Team as well as maintaining a large case load while attending to other collateral duties.