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Bodycam Catches Cop Planting Drugs During Traffic Stops

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A Florida deputy’s own body camera became the evidence that ended his career and put him in handcuffs.

For more than a year, something wasn’t adding up in Jackson County, Florida. A single sheriff’s deputy was racking up drug arrest after drug arrest, always with the same script — a busted tail light, the smell of marijuana, consent to search — and defendants kept insisting, case after case, that the drugs weren’t theirs. On July 10, 2019, that deputy, Zachary Wester, was arrested in Crawford, Florida, and charged with more than 50 crimes after investigators concluded he had been planting narcotics on the motorists he pulled over.

• Former Jackson County Sheriff’s Office deputy Zachary Wester was arrested July 10, 2019, and charged with over 50 counts, including racketeering, official misconduct, fabricating evidence, false imprisonment, and drug possession.
• Bodycam footage from a stop involving driver Teresa Odom showed Wester holding a plastic baggie of white substance in his hand before he searched her car, and a later internal inquiry found meth, marijuana, and paraphernalia stashed in the trunk of his own patrol vehicle.
• Prosecutors have already dropped charges in nearly 120 cases tied to Wester, freed at least eight people from prison sentences, and put more than 250 additional cases under review.

A Pattern of Stops That Public Defenders Couldn’t Ignore

The scheme started unraveling in mid-2018, not because of a whistleblower or a lucky break, but because local prosecutors and public defenders in Jackson County started noticing the same discrepancies over and over. Wester’s written police reports didn’t match what his own body camera was recording, and he was posting an unusually high number of drug arrests where the drivers weren’t just denying guilt — they were adamant, consistently, that the narcotics weren’t theirs. Faulty tail lights and the claimed smell of marijuana became the reliable pretext that opened the door to a vehicle search.

The Bodycam Moment That Broke the Case

The footage that turned suspicion into a criminal case involved a driver named Teresa Odom. In the video, Wester is seen holding a plastic baggie containing a white substance in his hand before he ever searches her vehicle — the kind of detail that’s easy to miss in real time but impossible to explain away once investigators go back and freeze the frame. That clip, examined alongside the NowThis report on the case, became a centerpiece of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s investigation into Wester’s traffic stops across the county.

Bags of methamphetamine, marijuana, and paraphernalia were later found stashed in the trunk of his own patrol car.

From Termination to Felony Charges

Once the internal inquiry uncovered the drugs in his own trunk, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office fired Wester in late 2018. That termination was only the beginning. The FDLE’s follow-up investigation led to his arrest on July 10, 2019, on charges that included racketeering, official misconduct, fabricating evidence, false imprisonment, and possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia — more than 50 counts in total, tied directly to the pattern of stops he’d been running.

Cases Unraveling Across Jackson County

The damage didn’t stop with Wester’s arrest. Prosecutors have dropped charges in nearly 120 cases connected to his stops, and at least eight people who’d already been sentenced to prison time have been released. More than 250 additional cases are now under review, meaning the number of vacated convictions and dismissed charges is almost certain to climb well beyond where it stood in mid-July 2019.

Every one of those 250-plus pending reviews traces back to the same starting point: a tail light, a claimed smell of marijuana, and a deputy who apparently didn’t need real drugs to make an arrest stick — until the camera on his own chest proved otherwise.