Addison (*) and her family were living at her grandmother’s house in Flagler County in early 2023. On Jan. 27, 2023, a Friday, Addison, 12, prepared to go to her middle school as she did every morning, starting with a shower. When she stepped out of the shower, she noticed a cell phone in the pocket of a bright pink bathrobe hanging from the door. She noticed a small hole in the bathrobe’s pocket.
She noticed the camera eye looking at her from that hole.
She pulled out the phone and immediately recognized it as that of her 31-year-old stepfather, Tyler Habdas. The phone’s video function was on. She stopped the video. It was 18 minutes long. The phone had been filming her the whole time. She watched a clip and deleted the video. “I just felt like I was embarrassed, I wanted it gone and I didn’t want it to be seen,” she would testify.
Later, upset and crying, she called her mother, a teacher at an elementary school who’d already left for work–Habdas stayed home to care for the younger children in the morning–and told her what she’d found.
After Habdas denied that he’d put the phone in the bathroom or taken video of Addison, her mother sent her daughter to a friend for the weekend and called the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, whose detectives obtained a warrant and seized the phone. Adam Gossett was the lead detective.
The video Addison saw would turn out to be one of three instances of video files–but not the video files themselves–detectives recovered from the phone’s cache. They were viewed several times based on forensic evidence, dating back to the previous November and December, and capturing Addison in various states of undress in the privacy of her bathroom.
Habdas was arrested in May 2023 after a four-month investigation.
At the end of a three-day trial today, and after deliberating barely an hour–it was out of the courtroom all of 65 minutes–a jury of four women and two men found Habdas, now 32, guilty on all nine charges of voyeurism of an underage child, child abuse, and illegal use of a cell phone he’d been charged with.
He faces a maximum of 75 years in prison when Circuit Judge Terence Perkins sentences him on Sept. 3, though the actual sentence will not be that steep.
Habdas had been out on $110,000 bond since the day of his arrest, not having yet spent a day in jail. He’d shaken his head several times during testimony, as if to disagree with what he was hearing. He clutched his head in his hands today during closing arguments, looking more despondent than he had in the first two days of trial. By the time he returned to the courtroom for the verdict, he had blanched in the face, as if he knew what was coming. He sobbed after the verdict.
The victim’s mother, stoic on the stand as she controlled her outrage, was quietly less stoic as she heard the verdict, flanked by the victim’s advocate and friends or family.
Habdas did not testify. His defense, the defense the prosecution ridiculed and the jury did not believe, was that he had taken video of his stepdaughter only out of parental concern. “What we are saying is that this was done as an incredibly dumb and terrible parenting decision,” defense attorney Spencer O’Neal told the jury. “This was done to monitor his daughter because he believed that he had to do so.”
Addison did not have a cell phone of her own. According to the defense, her stepfather worried she was sneaking her brother’s cell phone into the bathroom, was texting boys and going on social media.
“The defense is not asking you to find that Mr. Habdas’s actions were reasonable or rational and that’s not the standard that you should be considering,” O’Neal told the jury. “In fact, his actions were irrational. I think that’s very clear. But his irrationality is not equal to illegality.”
But then, Habdas lied to his wife about the phone, when she asked him about what her daughter had seen. The defense said he did so out of fear, after realizing he had done something dumb.
The investigation revealed that he had watched the clips several times over and over, suggesting that he was not just looking to see whether Addison was using her brother’s phone, but that he was using images of his stepdaughter for his own self-gratification.
Addison “will tell you she had no idea he was doing this when she would use the bathroom,” Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark told the jury in opening arguments Tuesday. “She expected that she had the privacy you expect in a bathroom when she’s going in there to take a shower. Nobody’s bothering her. Nobody was watching her. But in fact, her stepfather had been secretly recording her for a period of time.”
Addison had started her testimony on Tuesday with a smile, swinging in her chair and answering the prosecutor’s questions clearly and directly. Then, as is typically the case with abused or violated children asked to recall traumatic incidents, her voice lowered and her tears dropped as Clark asked her more specific questions about discovering the phone and the recording.
A test revealed she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. She went through months of counseling, all of which goes to the child abuse charge: it doesn’t have to be physical abuse.
Habdas had come into her life when she was 5. It had gone well until she was about 9, when, she told a Child Protection Team interviewer, he turned “mean” and started yelling at her, the severity of his parenting at odds with that of her mother (who had two younger children with Habdas; Addison and two siblings were from a previous marriage).
And there was that strange incident months before the video recording. Addison was taking a shower. Her sister was brushing her teeth. For some reason Habdas walked in. Addison asked for a face wash container that was on the counter. Habdas thrust his cell phone into the shower instead, supposedly as a joke. As Addison testified about it Tuesday and in Clark’s closing arguments today, that was no joke. That was yet one more indication that Habdas had ideas about his stepdaughter other than parenting.
Sheriff’s detective Mark Moy had analyzed the phone and in clear, methodical testimony on Tuesday, explained to the jury that while the evidence was not complete–a point of vulnerability O’Neal tried his best to exploit–it indicated that different files and file paths had been created, and cached documentation pointed to the files being accessed and viewed several times over. That, the prosecution argued, proved that Habdas was using the files at his pleasure, for his pleasure.
Habdas, Clark said, violated the parental trust “in an unimaginable way by recording her over and over again. Now, the defense is going to want you to believe that he did this as a bad parenting decision. That he did this because he couldn’t trust her. He wanted to monitor her, that she was I guess misbehaving in some way. I submit to you this was preposterous. It’s ridiculous. Let’s call it what it is. He did this because he was sexually attracted to his 12-year-old step-daughter. That is why he was recording her, in the bathroom, naked, on multiple occasions.”
Habdas was found guilty on three second-degree felony counts of voyeurism of a child, five third-degree felony charges of illegally using a cell phone, and a third degree felony charge of child abuse.
Shortly after she took the stand and the prosecutor was asking her a few basic questions, Addison was asked to identify Habdas in the courtroom, and to identify her relationship to him. At first she said “step-father.” Then she corrected: “ex-step-father.”
A bailiff put handcuffs on Habdas shortly after the verdict and took him into custody. HE was to spend his first night in jail tonight, his bond revoked.
(*) The name of the victim has been changed.
