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Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols’s patience with Zachary Tuohey’s aggravated stalking case almost ran out in December. It did so on April 1, when she sent him to jail for contempt of court. On Tuesday, she warned his attorney that he is close to facing two years in prison absent a commitment to treatment.
Tuohey was sentenced in late January to four years on probation after pleading to stalking a Palm Coast woman in violation of an injunction filed last August. Despite the injunction, he’d sent the woman 23 emails, four texts, a video, an invitation to Sea World, and drove to her house, forcing her to hide in a bedroom with her twin children and call 911.
Tuohey, 35, a resident of Orlando, accumulated several probation violations starting in mid-March. He’d left the county without permission in mid-March, then took off his GPS ankle monitor on several occasions, or allowed its battery to run out. He is required to wear the monitor until at least next October.
“Although this is the offender’s first technical violation,” Karen Munoz, his probation officer, wrote in a recommendation to the court, “the offender is a Violent Felon of Special Concern due to prior history of aggravated stalking after injunction. She enumerated the series of violations, adding: “The offender has been given multiple chances to correct his behavior and has been instructed numerous times that he must carry the device with him at all times and to charge it for a minimum of 4 hours per day. However, he continues to ignore the rules of electronic monitoring.”
The probation officer recommended modifying Tuohey’s probation to house arrest. In the meantime, he’d emailed Nichols directly to complain about the monitor and ask why he was still on it. He was ordered to appear in court on April 1. He did. It did not go well. He was taken into custody until further notice.
(It is not clear how he got the judge’s email address. He has also sent FlaglerLive an odd email about a previous article about him violating “copyright infringement laws,” and a threat to sue if it was not removed.)
The State Attorney’s Office has made an offer of two years in prison to settle the probation violation, even though he is exposed to up to four years in prison.
On Tuesday Nichols asked for a status update from his latest attorney, Assistant Public Defender Spencer O’Neal. “I think we were just going to give you the opportunity to talk to your client and see what was going on,” Nichols told him. Tuohey was not in court. “Is he being cooperative or challenging?”
“He’s not challenging,” O’Neal said, noting the presence of several family members. “I’ve gotten an extensive history from them,” an allusion to Tuohey’s mental health issues. “I’d like to have Tuohey see a psychiatrist, and then maybe try to present to the court and go to the state, an option as far as treatment plan, because I think that there’s an underlying mental health issue that needs to be addressed.”
The judge doesn’t question the mental health issue. “I just don’t know how cooperative he will be with receiving treatment,” she said. Nichols was not opposed to giving the attorney time to come up with a plan. But she’s keeping Tuohey on a very tight leash: the plan has to be diagnosed, and it has to provide what she called “a safety net for the community.” She gave him 60 days to come up with it. Meanwhile, Tuohey stays in jail.
“We’ve got to figure this out, because if we don’t figure it out, he’s heading to state prison,” Nichols said.
It was of a piece with a case that has had elements of the bizarre from the start. Before his January sentence he’d played word games with law enforcement, wondering in an email whether the order on his GPS monitor, which he is required to wear, allowed him to tamper with it.
As Tuohey was awaiting that earlier disposition, there had also been the case of yet another alleged violation when the victim received a check in the mail, seemingly from Tuohey. That’s when Tuohey’s parents, who are separated, told the judge of how the mailed envelope was their work. It was meant for one of them, not for the victim, they claimed. Somehow the envelope got addressed in Tuohey’s hand to the victim and was mailed there. They insisted it was not Tuohey’s doing.
