Before I was a candidate, I was a daughter of Arlington, a trooper, an investigator, a wife, and a mother. Everything on my platform comes from somewhere real. Here's where.
I grew up right here in Arlington, in Jacksonville, and I still live in that exact same house today. This district is the block I learned to ride a bike on, not some abstraction.
I'm the first generation of my family born in the United States. Both of my parents were born in Jamaica and became naturalized American citizens. I grew up watching what it takes to build a life in a country that isn't the one you were born in: the paperwork, the patience, the work, and the pride. That's where the More Perfect Union Act comes from. It's my family's story, written into law.
I come from a blended family myself, so long before I was building a blended family of my own, I understood what that actually looks like day to day, the logistics of it, the love in it, the way "family" doesn't always fit the boxes on a form. My biological father lived in Canada while I was growing up. We stayed close, we spoke often, I visited when I could, and to this day I call him Dad. My stepfather, who I call Daddy, is the one who was here, day in and day out, and he's an entrepreneur, he owns De Real Ting Cafe, right here in Jacksonville. My mother has been a teacher in Duval County since 1993. Between the three of them, I grew up watching what it actually takes to build something, what it actually takes to show up for other people's kids every single day, and what it actually takes to stay a family across distance. Those aren't separate lessons. They're the same lesson, told a few different ways, and they're the reason this campaign exists.
I earned dual Bachelor's degrees in Criminal Justice Studies and Criminal Forensic Studies, with a minor in Anthropology, at Florida Gulf Coast University. I went on to earn my Master of Science in Criminal Justice at the University of North Florida. I intend to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in Forensic Psychology next. Every degree has been in service of the same throughline: understanding the systems, criminal justice, family, community, the mind, that shape people's lives, for better or worse.
My career has put me directly inside the systems I'm now running to fix. Not reading about them. Working inside them.
Writing under the pen name R.A. Tutson, I'm the self-published author of The Fourth Floor: Scarred Systems, a book that grew directly out of everything I've seen working inside Florida's criminal justice and child welfare systems. It also walks through one of the hardest chapters of my own life: the birth of my last child, and everything that came after it, including losing my uterus after nearly hemorrhaging to save my life. I wrote it because I believe people deserve the truth, in every direction, about the systems I've served in, and about what my own body went through.
In May 2026, I opened my own LLC, a step toward building something of my own, on top of everything I've already given to public service, because I believe in building things, not just critiquing what's broken.
My husband and I have been together for ten years, and married for almost four, we got married on 12/12/2022. Together, we're raising a blended family: I'm a mother of three and a stepmother to one. Every night at our table looks like what I want more of Florida to look like, different backgrounds, different starting points, all of it held together by choice and by commitment, not just by paperwork.
That's part of why the Fruit of the Tree Act and the Til Death Do Us Part Act matter so much to me personally. I'm not writing legislation about families I've only read about. I'm writing it about my own kitchen table.
