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A University of Virginia student, fed up with unwanted contact from a schoolmate with whom she'd gone on a couple of dates, sent him what would seem like a polite request to stop bothering her. "Hello Owen, I really hope you are doing well, but please stop messaging me," she wrote. "Good luck with everything.
" But Owen Chase Kidd's messages kept coming. "I tried to kill you and give you throat cancer with death magic, and I wonder if you felt that," he wrote two months after that entreaty to stop. There was more.
"You're alive," he wrote in one message, "for now." That's when the young woman called police and received a visit from a Charlottesville police investigator. Kidd "She showed [me] her phone and showed [me] the hundreds of messages that he had been sending her almost daily," wrote the investigating officer, Devin Brannon.
The woman told Brannon that the trouble began two years when she went on two dates with Kidd. "She did not feel any connection," Brannon wrote, "and it did not go any further than that." The 22-year-old Kidd persisted with messages that would come in waves despite "several instances" of her requesting cessation, according to the investigator, who construed some of the messages, including some arriving last spring, as threatening.
Kidd was arrested May 10 and taken to Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail where he received bail despite the investigator's urging that he be held. Kidd told the magistrate that on the day of his arrest he refrained from his marijuana habit, a cessation that caused him, he told the magistrate, "a lot of mental and emotional pain." It was not disputed that Kidd, who was represented by the Office of the Public Defender, made all of his unwanted contact electronically and not in person, according to his court file.
But there were hundreds of messages flowing across multiple social media platforms, according to the police investigator. During his arrest, Kidd allegedly asked the officers to go back inside his apartment near the UVa-adjacent Corner neighborhood to retrieve his phone. They complied and promptly seized the phone and obtained a search warrant to examine its contents, according to an affidavit.
Virginia law makes a first stalking conviction a misdemeanor, though subsequent infractions can be treated as a Class 6 felony. Having no prior criminal record, Kidd recently resolved his charge with an arrangement called a deferred disposition, which may allow him to avoid not only additional jail time but also the stigma of a criminal conviction. Appearing in Charlottesville General District Court June 11, Kidd agreed to several court conditions including a yearlong ban on alcohol and illegal drugs as well as mental and substance abuse evaluations overseen by Offender Aid and Restoration, a nonprofit group that monitors people in the judicial system.
The deferred disposition will likely result in no conviction for Kidd as long he abides by the rules and reports his success back to the court on June 10 of next year. Hawes Spencer (434) 960-9343 [email protected] @HawesSpencer on X Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email.
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