Key Largo business owner indicted on child sexual abuse charges

A Monroe County grand jury indicted Key Largo resident Jeffrey Scott Kesling, the owner of Keys Meads, on five counts tied to the alleged sexual abuse of two children, ages 3 and 7, a case that has jolted a small-business community built on trust and public visibility.

Prosecutors said the alleged abuse spanned an 18-month period, from June 2023 to December 2024, in Monroe County. The indictment included two counts of sexual battery on a child under 12 and three counts of lewd and lascivious molestation. Under Florida law, sexual battery on a child under 12 by an adult is a capital felony, while lewd and lascivious molestation against a child under 12 is a life felony.

The legal stakes are severe. Florida’s capital sexual battery statute allows for a separate penalty phase in which the punishment can be death or life imprisonment. The three molestation counts carried bond amounts that totaled $450,000.

The case moved from investigation to arrest over several weeks. Monroe County sheriff’s deputies began investigating Kesling in March 2025, and he was arrested on April 4, 2025, before the grand jury later returned its five-count indictment on April 15, 2025.

State Attorney Dennis Ward and the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office publicly condemned the allegations, and Chief Assistant State Attorney Joseph Mansfield also denounced the conduct as evil. Their response underscored how seriously prosecutors are treating the case, which involves very young children and a business owner with a public profile in the Upper Keys.

Keys Meads is more than a private side business. Records list the company as formed in December 2014, and local reporting said it opened in 2017 before expanding from mead production into a distillery and a vendor at popular Florida Renaissance fairs and other family-oriented festivals. That public presence means the indictment reaches beyond a courtroom filing and into a recognizable part of Key Largo’s local economy.

The charges do not prove guilt, and the case will now proceed through the courts. But the indictment already raises hard questions for Monroe County about child protection, community oversight and how quickly institutions can respond when allegations involve both vulnerable children and a well-known local business owner.