This Keys couple forced a pair of tourists off an island. Now they’re both prisoners
A Florida Keys man who lived on an undeveloped island off of Key West with his wife is off to prison for two years for threatening a tourist with a knife in 2018.
The local couple forced a visiting couple who had been snorkeling and walking the beach on Wisteria Island to flee to their rented boat.
Christopher Yarema, 44, pleaded no contest to aggravated assault and felony criminal mischief on Dec. 20 for the Wisteria Island attack on two tourists from California on Oct. 27, 2018.
He told police he saw people near his island campsite.
“Hey, Mr. Speedo, get the [expletive] off our island!” Yarema and his wife, Stephanie Burnham, yelled at the men who were packing up to leave at the sight of the angry couple.
One also used a gay slur.
Monroe County Circuit Court Judge Mark Jones sentenced Yarema to 24 months in state prison followed by 36 months of probation.
Burnham, 37, pleaded no contest in November to battery and received a year in the Monroe County jail.
She yelled at the two men that they had two seconds to get off the island or she would kill them, police said.
She also punched one of them in the face, damaging his sunglasses, and struck him in the head with a boat oar.
Yarema pulled out a knife and swung it at the same man but missed.
But he did use the four-inch blade to stab the tourists’ inflatable boat, which they had used to get to the island from the larger boat they had rented and anchored.
The victim and his partner were able to get away by holding onto the deflating inflatable dinghy, using it as a raft. They made it back to their anchored boat and called for help over the boat radio
Wisteria Island, also known as Christmas Tree Island, remains in an ownership fight between developers and the federal government. Without a clear owner, the land has been turned into a makeshift community by the homeless.
Assistant State Attorney Christine Poist handled the case.
Yarema had previously been accused of violence and was on probation. The judge gave him 24 months in prison — to be served concurrently — for violating the probation in a 2016 case by getting arrested for the 2018 island assault.
In the 2016 case, he pleaded no contest to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after holding a knife to a 69-year-old man’s neck at a Stock Island convenience store and telling him, “I want to kill you.”
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