Santa Monica police arrested a 19-year-old homeless man on Tuesday, Nov. 12 after six months of stalking and harassing a girl he had briefly dated in early summer.
Officers of the Santa Monica Police Department were called out to the 700 block of 21st Place at 2:51 pm on this day in order to investigate a report of a family disturbance.
When they arrived the officers spoke with the female victim who told them she had been involved in a “brief” dating relationship with the suspect. She said that the relationship had ended “amicably.”
Earlier this year in June, the victim began receiving emails via Facebook (Facebook is an online social networking service and its name is derived from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some American university administrations in order to help students get to know one another).
In these messages the suspect repeatedly proclaimed his love for the victim and made a point of stressing how vital it was for them to re-engage their relationship.
These emails were soon supplemented by the more traditional mode of communication known as telephone calls, where the suspect again reiterated his desire for a pair-bonding experience.
On top of that the suspect harassed the victim on Instagram (this is an online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services as well as send messages within the site itself), again requesting that their love relationship resume.
The victim did not respond in kind and as a result the tone of the suspect’s messages mutated from declarations of love and affection into more sinister ones where the suspect told the victim that he hated her and that she “did not care about him.”
The suspect then began to show up at the victim’s abode uninvited. This made the victim fearful.
On one occasion the police were called and informed the suspect that he would be arrested if he trespassed at the victim’s residence again.
This leads us to the above date when the victim called the police to say that the suspect had again been knocking on her door, and that she wanted the suspect to be arrested for stalking.
The officers found the suspect at the location and he was arrested and charged with willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly following or willfully and maliciously harassing the victim and making a credible threat with the intent to place the victim in reasonable fear for her safety.
Bail was set at $50,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of The Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
