ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Channel 9 has learned that three Orange County firefighters have lost their jobs for lying on their timesheets to rack up overtime.
Allegations against six firefighters were first reported last week. Those allegations sparked an internal investigation.
Lt. Eddie Brown was one of those fired Tuesday night. He sometimes served as a spokesman for Orange County Fire Rescue.
Two other lieutenants were also fired; they were accused of falsifying their time sheets, misusing their county-owned vehicles and racking up overtime.
In all of the cases investigators with Orange County Fire Rescue compared the workers' time sheets to the GPS tracking devices in their county vehicles.
They reported finding many instances of the firefighters reporting those times as work-related, when they were actually attending to personal business.
"Not only were they doing personal business on county time, but they went beyond their normal work schedules so they were getting overtime as well. Then they were using county vehicles, county fuel to do the personal business," said Orange County Fire Chief Otto Drozd.
Records show Lt. Stacy McLean -- a trainer -- spent time at his home 17 times (time 17 times is redundant -- can you rephrase?) without authorization and didn't clock out for breaks.
According to records, paramedic Willie James told investigators he "lost track of time" when he went home 32 times without approval.
Brown reportedly also had dozens of violations.
Two more firefighters were reprimanded.