Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols’s usually cheery disposition had vanished. “Somebody is being cute, and I don’t appreciate it,” she said, addressing Zachary Tuohey and his lawyer, Travis Mydock.
Tuohey, 34, is facing a felony charge of aggravated stalking after an injunction. He was arrested in October for repeatedly violating an injunction by continuing to send communications to Vera (*). He posted bail on $25,000 bond and was released with a GPS ankle monitor. It isn’t a high profile case. It isn’t even one of the more compelling cases on the felony court’s docket. But its bizarre turns and the maneuvers by the defendant and his family illustrate how difficult it can be at times for authorities, including the court, to ensure that victims of harassment or stalking, alleged as those may be in this case, remain protected.
Tuohey hasn’t made it easy on cops and the court. He got cute with both, sending Nichols and sheriff brass an email at the end of November saying: “My GPS paperwork says ‘DO not tamper with the device,'” he wrote, then asked: “Technically the ‘D-O’ comes before the not. Does this mean I can in fact tamper/remove the device?”
The email had disturbed Mydock, as had other behavior by Tuohey, to the point that Mydock filed a motion suggesting that his client may not be competent to proceed to trial with the charge. Mydock cited the email in his motion, and as he stood with Tuohey before the judge earlier this week, said there were further reasons who he thought his client was not competent. “I’ll have conversation with him, and then the next day, he’ll ask me the same exact question and not recall basically what I told him,” Mydock explained.
The judge wasn’t convinced. Tuohey in front of her was answering questions clearly enough. And neither his competence nor the strange email were the reason he was back in court Monday. The state had filed a motion to revoke his bond, because despite the injunction, despite the arrest, the state claimed he was continuing to communicate with Vera. Nichols wasn’t even referring to the email when she intimated that either Tuohey or his family were again being “cute.” She as referring to the repeat contact, and the way Tuohey was claiming innocence.
Nichols got so exasperated with Tuohey that at one point she was ready to grant both motions–revoking bond, sending him to jail and having him evaluated, both to determine his competence and to see whether contact with Vera would continue, at which point the court would know if he really was the culprit. She backed down as Mydock argued that both Tuohey’s parents could (and did) testify that they were to blame for the contact, as was Tuohey’s 6-year-old daughter, which they claimed was inadvertent.
“I’m gonna tell you right now,” Nichols said from the bench, glaring at the family in the gallery and at Tuohey in front of her, “stop playing games and stop coming right up to the edge of it, because now you’re on notice here in the courtroom. If [the victim] receives anything from either Mr. Tuohey or his family members or his friends, you are on notice: No more accidents, no more texts, nothing. Do you understand?”
The family agreed. Tuohey agreed.
“As much as I hate to deny the state’s motion, I’m going to deny the state’s motion today, but,” she told the Vera, who had attended the hearing by zooom, “if you have any more other incidents, I expect that you will report those to the State Attorney’s Office.”
The victim had dated Tuohey until August 2022. They broke up. Starting that October, Tuohey, who lives in Orlando, sent 180 emails, at least 20 handwritten letters to her home and place of work in Palm Coast, tried contacting her through social media and managed to contact her mother through it. The communications were “obsessive,” Vera wrote the court, “and vary between verbally abusive, sexual in nature, and love bombing.”
Some included pictures of her children as if intended to be intimidating, including one that appeared to have been punched. The messages “sometimes includes personal information about my whereabouts, activities, and even interactions with other people, indicating that he has been closely monitoring me,” she wrote, suggesting that he was following her from a distance. He’s called her names, called her a psycho, called her kids psychos. He would tell her how he drove to Palm Coast (he owns a Tesla, and told the judge he was a Realtor) “just to reflect back on the memories” they shared. “This evidence clearly shows a pattern of behavior that is invasive and harmful,” she wrote in her petition for the injunction.
Circuit Judge Chris France granted a preliminary injunction then a permanent injunction on Aug. 22, which remains in effect. It also prohibited any direct or indirect contact by Tuohey, though the wording could be interpreted to have a loophole: it did not explicitly prohibit third-party contact that may be related to Tuohey.
Repeated emails after the injunction had led to Tuohey’s arrest. After he was released, Vera received a text simply with the word “No,” and a mailed check, apparently with Tuohey’s handwriting, dating back to February 2023. She reported both to the State Attorney’s Office, leading to the motion to revoke his bond.
“There’s a lot of history between these parties that continue contact,” Assistant State Attorney Tara Libby told the court, “and here we have more continued contact, but now under these circumstances that his family members are going to attest to, that they’re the ones who did it, and I find that very concerning.”
Tuohey said his 6-year-old daughter had sent the text to Vera, not him. Then Tuohey’s father stood before the court and provided a story almost as bizarre as his son’s email to the court about the GPS monitor. He claiming that he’d gone over to his son’s house to tidy up some paperwork, found the check, found the envelope, and didn’t want either mixed in with other papers, or to leave items addressed to Vera at the house. So he decided to put the check in the envelope, which was stamped and apparently already addressed to Vera. He then put the envelope in the mailbox for Tuohey’s mother to pick up–from the mailbox. It was never clear why he did not hold on to the paperwork, if he didn’t want it at his son’s house, or hand it to his mother, though the two are divorced. “She apparently forgot to take it out” of the mailbox, the man said. The mail carrier eventually took it, and that’s how it ended up being mailed to the victim.
So you put a stamped envelope addressed to the victim in a mailbox, a disbelieving Libby asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he replied.
Before the latest alleged violation, the prosecution had offered Tuohey to plead out in exchange for a few years on probation and what likely would have been a withheld adjudication, meaning that by the time he’d completed probation, he would not be a convicted felon. Mydock wasn’t comfortable with that for his client. “I think it’s going to set him up to come back in front of the court real quick,” the defense attorney said–which is why he was pushing for an evaluation of his competency.
But ended up ruling against granting that evaluation just as she did against the revocation of bond. Tuohey is due back in court on jan. 22 for a pre-trial hearing.
