Ryan Satz charged with impersonating an officer, carrying a concealed firearm, and using a firearm while committing a felony

Police intend to charge 21-year-old Ryan Satz with impersonating an officer, carrying a concealed firearm, and using a firearm while committing a felony.
suspicious driver tipped deputies off to a man who's accused of posing as a cop, carrying a pistol and knives, and pulling other drivers over. A white Chevy Tahoe sat locked inside a St. Augustine impound yard Thursday afternoon. It's the vehicle deputies say Ryan Satz used the night before to run some drivers off the road and pull other drivers over on Interstate 95 and State Road 207 in St. Johns County. A woman called the sheriff's office after she got suspicious. She said she was watching Satz make one of his bogus traffic stops, and she didn't buy the blue light on the dashboard. She said she recognized Satz, and knew he was no police officer. "We were able to catch up to that suspect vehicle, conducted a traffic stop on it, and then a whole host of events unfolded from that point," said Sgt. Chuck Mulligan with the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office. Mulligan says when deputies caught up with Satz, he was wearing an outfit that looked like a sheriff's light duty uniform. On top of that, according to a police report, he had with him a .40 caliber handgun, several knives, a pepper spray can, an extendable nightstick, night vision goggles, and a flashlight that can blink blue or red. "He is not unknown to us -- we are familiar with this subject," Mulligan said. Satz was once a police explorer, which is a sort of junior intern, with the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office, Mulligan said. Since then he's had at least four arrests. And after real deputies locked Satz in a patrol car Wednesday, Mulligan says his cool cop persona dissolved into outbursts and threats. "He begins to do certain things in the car that lead us to believe he's gonna try to harm himself and makes statements to that effect," Mulligan said. "And then [he] states that it was a good thing that law enforcement didn't catch up to him at his house after he got home, because there would have been a lot of dead cops, via his AR-15 rifle."

Posted in: Johns County