Immokalee, FL — A Bag of Berries, an Arrest, and a Bigger Story

What started as a quiet Wednesday morning near Immokalee High School ended with a pair of handcuffs, a half-filled rice sack, and a 79-year-old man at the center of a story that says as much about desperation as it does about the law.

Deputies arrested Solon Riphin, a longtime Immokalee resident, after finding him picking saw palmetto berries near the school’s athletic fields. The berries—small, green, and largely unremarkable to most—are listed in Florida as a “commercially exploited plant.” That means collecting them without a permit is illegal, even if you’re paid a mere dollar per pound, as Riphin told officers he had been.

To supplement manufacturers, the berries are gold, often marketed as natural remedies for prostate issues. To the state of Florida, they’re tightly regulated. To Riphin, they were just a way to make a few bucks.

With a faded rice sack slung over his shoulder and his back bent in the August sun, Riphin didn’t cut the image of a hardened criminal. And yet, prior drug convictions meant law enforcement knew his name. But on this day, witnesses say he looked less like a threat and more like “a man doing what he could to survive.”

In Immokalee, a community shaped by decades of agricultural labor and economic precarity, Riphin’s arrest felt like a symptom of something bigger. With wages stagnant and seasonal work unreliable, risking a misdemeanor for a few pounds of berries isn’t just about breaking the law—it’s about trying to stay afloat.

He now faces charges of trespassing and illegal harvesting. His case will wind its way through the courts like any other. But for those who saw him quietly led away, berry sack still in hand, the image will linger.

It was a small crime. A tiny sack. But for a man nearing 80, it may be the final chapter in a life spent scraping by in the margins of Florida’s agricultural machine. And for the rest of us, it’s a reminder: sometimes, survival looks like theft.