Toward the end of June a woman contacted the Sheriff’s Operations Center about a disturbing Facebook message she’d received from a 16-year-old girl. The girl, Chelsea (*), told the woman to be sure to keep David Chenowith away from her children.
Chenowith is a 32-year-old resident of Palm Coast, the father of a 10-year-old girl, and a convicted felon with an extensive arrest record and a previous state prison stint of almost three years. On July 18, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office arrested him on charges of statutory rape of a 16 year old, molesting a girl younger than 16, and human trafficking of a minor–two second-degree felonies and a life felony if convicted.
Chelsea reported to the woman that Chenowith had engaged in sexual activity with her since she was 15, which would be unlawful, and that he may have sexually abused her little sister. In an interview with Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies, Chelsea said she’d started hanging out with Chenowith even though she didn’t like him, because he had pot, he bought her things, took her places, and claimed he was 19, though before long he’d owned up to being 32.
He also told her that all he wanted to do was help her family. He met Chelsea’s mother and gave her $3,000 to help the family move. But right after the move in May, Chenowith started being more controlling of Chelsea and of her family, saying she was to have no boys around. Chelsea had started a relationship with him as he would seek to trade pot for sex, according to his arrest report–either at her apartment at Tuscan Reserve, when she stayed at the Microtel for a month, or at his mother’s house on Langdon Drive in Palm Coast. When they were in public, he would tell her to lie about her age.
He was also equipped with Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, in instances when he did not use protection when abusing the girl.
Using what they call “investigative techniques,” which in such cases usually involved controlled calls or texts, with detectives at one end of the line, without the suspect’s knowledge, Chenowith made various admissions: Chelsea had contacted him and claimed to him that she was pregnant: “You made a mistake and now I’m pregnant,” she told him.
“Alright, man, I ain’t made no mistake if a grown-up girl is trying to sell me coochie,” he replied. “I ain’t make no mistake.”
Last Wednesday, he allegedly committed the offenses that aggravated the charges to trafficking: he sent her $50 through Apple Pay after asking her for sexually explicit pictures, then sent her a video of him sexually abusing her.
“During the investigation,” his arrest report states, Chenowith “confirmed numerous times that he had sexual intercourse with” Chelsea. The report describes him as grooming her for sex from the time she was 15.
Authorities issued a be-on-the-lookout for Chenowith on July 18, locating him driving his Toyota on Matanzas Woods Parkway. He was pulled over at Laramie and Lynwood Drive and ordered out of his vehicle at gunpoint. (At one point an uninvolved civilian’s car appears in the line of fire at the intersection where the stop was taking place, then immediately backed up out of sight.)
Deputies had seen Chenowith make “furtive movements” in the car before getting out, according to his arrest report. They allegedly found marijuana, THC gummies, THC cartridges, 9 grams of fentanyl and 9 grams of cocaine, resulting in additional charges of trafficking fentanyl, a first-degree felony, and two counts of drug possession.
“I am well aware of the horrendous crime I committed, as well as the shamefully, embarrassing way I went about getting arrested,” Chenowith wrote Circuit Judge Matt Foxman in 2016, following his arrest at the time on fleeing and eluding police right after he’d been pulled over in the Walmart parking lot, the incident that resulted in his conviction and three-year prison sentence. “I was in a very bad place,” he wrote, blaming the incident on others: his wife and daughter had left for New Jersey for six weeks. “During the month that my family was gone, I went down a road filed with false sense of security” He partied every day, “buying a bunch of drugs and doing them in my apartment.”
He begged the judge, “if there is anything you could do to save my lovely future wife and beautiful daughter we would appreciate it more than you will ever know.” In 2020, he filed a petition to determine the child’s paternity. He was found to be her natural father. On Friday, the child’s mother filed an emergency motion for immediate, full custody.
Chenowith is being held at the Flagler County jail on $117,500 bond on some of the charges and no bond on others. He is also battling a domestic battery charge following an alleged confrontation with his child’s mother last year.
