Bunnell Pastor Charles Cowart Receives Probation for Axe Incident After his Wife Pleads for Leniency

Charles Cowart will not serve jail time as a result of an incident last November when he broke his own apartment’s door down with an axe and allegedly came close to striking a man with his car. 

Bunnell police charged him with two counts of aggravated assault and a count of criminal mischief, all third degree felonies. The other listed “victim” was his wife, even though she was not in the apartment at the time. Her son was. She did not want charges filed against him, and subsequently pleaded with the court to end all proceedings against him. 

“I want them to drop the case against Charles Cowart,” she wrote in a December affidavit. “I do not fear Charles Cowart and he did not harm me. I was not struck, harmed, or assaulted. I do not believe that Charles Cowart has anger issues, and I am not afraid of him. I favor the release of Charles Cowart and further favor a nolle pross of any criminal charges against him where I am the ‘victim.’” “Nolle pross” is a Latin abbreviation that essentially means dropping charges. 

On Wednesday, Cowart pleaded to a misdemeanor and a third-degree felony charge of aggravated assault before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols, who sentenced him to three years of probation, with numerous conditions, and court costs of close to $1,000. The sentence was a significant downward departure from the sentencing guidelines, which called for almost 14 months in prison. But the case as filed by Bunnell police was not without its problems. 

On the day of the incident, Cowart’s wife wrote in her affidavit, she was experiencing “significant emotional distress” for reasons unrelated to the incident, having just started a particular prescription, and was “not in a clear, calm, or grounded mental state” when she filed a restraining order against Cowart on Nov. 17. The order was dismissed on Dec. 9 at her request. 

The incident took place at the couple’s home in the Palm Pointe apartment complex off State Road 100 in Bunnell. 

Charles Cowart, a pastor and a recovering substance abuser with a complicated history of his own in the county, much of it in the public eye for the wrong reasons and in law enforcement’s crosshairs, had filed for divorce at the time of the incident. He dismissed the filing in early January. Both Cowarts were in the courtroom Wednesday. A no-violent-contact order remains in place between them. 

“Do you understand what no-violent contact means?” the judge asked Cowart as he was being fingerprinted. “This is important. So if you guys are arguing, things start to escalate, you just walk away, and you’re the one that needs to walk away.” Cowart was represented by Aaron Delgado of Daytona Beach’s Delgado and Associates and prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Tara Libby.

A Year in Prison and 7 on Probation for John Weis

In an unrelated case, Nichols sentenced John Weis, a 27-year-old former resident of Francis Lane in Palm Coast, to a year in prison and seven years of probation following his plea to molesting a 13-year-old girl at Wickline Park in Flagler Beach last April. Weis pleaded guilty. The plea agreement was also a significant downward departure from the minimum recommended sentence of 51 months in prison, or four years and three months. 

The girl’s mother had dropped her off at the beach with the girl’s friends for a few hours. 

The girl had walked up to a store nearby, met Weis there–whom she’d not known previously–and started playing chess with him in front of the store. They then walked to his car at the park, where they smoked marijuana that he offered. He then started kissing her against her will before fondling her aggressively as she protested. She left after he attempted to get under her clothes. 

She ended up hospitalized after getting ill with uncontrolled vomiting from pot poisoning, which required a transfusion. It was at the hospital that she informed a nurse of the assault. She had also snapped pictures of Weis and his car, and later exchanged “controlled” texts with him–meaning under the supervision of law enforcement, to entice Weis to confess, which he did to a point. “I think that you might be a little too young for me but I do love your energy by the way,” he wrote her, lying about his age: he told her he was 21. 

On a different occasion, when he though he was texting her but was actually texting a police officer–though he may have sensed that something was amiss–he wrote: “you know how society is, um they’re going to look at me a like a scumbag for even talking to you right now, and I just, you know, I don’t want to catch a crime, a charge or some shit like that, you know. I just wouldn’t want that lingering over my head.” He also wrote: “I’m so sorry I thought you were much older. You have a mature look to you. Now I’ve learned to always ask more questions. You shouldn’t have been smoking with me.”

It was too late. Nichols also designated Weis a sex offender for life. He had 251 days’ credit for time served at the county jail, which will likely limit his time in state prison to a so-called reception center, where inmates are first sent for several weeks or months before they are permanently assigned to another prison. 

He was represented by defense attorney Doug Williams and prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark.