Kylie Bearse, a meteorologist at Denver’s Fox31, usually loves interacting with viewers outside of the TV screen.
It’s wonderful when they say hello in person, and Bearse, 36, cherishes those genuine connections.
But over the last few years, one viewer crossed a line, she said, and became obsessed with her. He messaged her repeatedly, making new accounts when she blocked him. He claimed she was his wife. He showed up to events she hosted, once with an unwanted gift. He found her personal cell number. He messaged her family and friends.
And he didn’t stop when she asked him to.
Bearse, who has lived in Denver since 2018 and previously worked for 9News, received a temporary restraining order in September 2023. The man quieted down for a couple months before starting up again, violating the order more than 50 times through social media posts and other online interactions.
In January 2024, after six months of unwelcome attention, Bearse received a permanent restraining order against him. The 69-year-old man was legally prohibited from contacting her in any way or coming physically near her.
Bearse didn’t hear from him for about 18 months. But then, on Sept. 11, as she backed into her garage at home, a truck pulled in front of her vehicle and stopped. The driver rolled down the window.
“It hits me that it is him,” Bearse said. She closed her garage door and rushed inside. The man went to her front door, rang the doorbell. Bearse grabbed her dog, called 911 and fled out the back door. It was just after 11 a.m. on a Thursday.
The man was still sitting in his truck outside her house, unarmed, when Denver police officers arrested him around noon, according to a police report, which noted that Bearse was “visibly shaken and afraid.”
Bearse hoped the man would be charged with felony stalking, but prosecutors in the Denver District Attorney’s Office instead charged him with violating a protection order, a misdemeanor. The man was released from jail a few days after his arrest on a $1,500 personal recognizance bond while his case is pending, court records show.
“I feel awful,” Bearse said. “I’ve found different housing since he got out of jail. …My whole sense of safety has completely shifted, and it’s a horrible, sick-to-your-stomach feeling. …I believe this man should be in jail right now. He’s repeatedly stalked me for years.”
The Fox31 meteorologist’s experience highlights the complexities of stalking cases and shows how the criminal justice system — and prosecutors’ charging decisions — can leave victims feeling unprotected. State data shows that Denver prosecutors charge stalking cases less frequently than neighboring jurisdictions, and advocates worry that stalking isn’t always taken seriously by those in power.
Bearse hopes that speaking out about the situation will help other women.
“The bigger picture is making sure that, going forward, other people don’t have to experience this,” she said.
Why no stalking charge
The prosecutor on Bearse’s case told her that he didn’t think it warranted a felony stalking charge because more than 18 months had passed between the first spate of incidents and the day the man showed up at her house, she said.
Colorado law defines stalking, in part, as when a person knowingly and repeatedly follows, approaches, contacts or communicates with another person in a way that causes that person serious emotional distress. Repeatedly is defined as “on more than one occasion.”
“They did not consider what he did ‘repeated,’” Bearse said. “They said too much time had passed within that year-and-a-half where he didn’t do anything. But there is no timeframe listed in that statute. So it basically comes down to what the DA and the judge are deciding… He said it was a judgment call.”
Matt Jablow, a spokesman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the pending case.
A statewide review shows Denver prosecutors bring felony stalking charges less frequently than prosecutors in other counties, according to records from the Colorado Judicial Department.
Over the last five years, Denver prosecutors have filed stalking charges in 183 cases. In El Paso County, which has a similarly sized population, prosecutors filed 659 cases with stalking charges over the same time period, the court data shows.
Boulder, Adams, Jefferson, Larimer and Douglas counties charged stalking cases at higher rates than Denver when factoring in each county’s population, the data showed. Prosecutors in Arapahoe and Weld counties filed at a lower rate than in Denver.
It’s tough to draw conclusions from that data because charging decisions are very case-specific, said Stan Garnett, a former Boulder County district attorney.
“Prosecutors have a lot of discretion as to whether they charge a particular case, and there can be cases where there is enough evidence to charge but for one reason or another a prosecutor decides not to,” Garnett said, noting he did not know the specifics of Bearse’s case.
But generally, stalking prosecutions must consider the defendant’s state of mind — that’s the “knowingly” piece of the law — and that can be difficult to prove, especially if the incidents are spread out over time, he said.
A review of a random handful of stalking cases in which Denver prosecutors did pursue felony charges over the last five years shows a wide range of circumstances.
Denver prosecutors charged one man with stalking after he showed up to a woman’s house in January in violation of a protection order and sent the woman unsolicited photos, messages and phone calls over three weeks, court records show.
In another case, prosecutors pursued a stalking charge against a man who violated a 2016 civil protection order by sending 92 emails to a former romantic partner over a month-long span in late 2019 and early 2020, as well as showing up to her relative’s house in that same timeframe.
In a third case, Denver prosecutors brought a stalking charge against a man who was living in his vehicle after he twice in a month followed a woman — a stranger to him who lived nearby, whom he believed he was engaged to — and for about two weeks left his spot on the street at the same time the woman left her home for work.
“Everybody has the same difficulties with stalking,” said Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen, whose jurisdiction includes El Paso and Teller counties. “They are tough cases to prove, and you have to have enough evidence to support it.”
The vast majority of the stalking cases his office prosecutes are related to domestic violence situations between people who know each other, rather than a stranger stalking a public figure, he said.
“We know stalking has a lethality component to it,” he said. “That makes us take a hard look at these cases and be willing to take chances, appropriate chances. …Domestic violence is endemic — there is not one area of society where it is more prevalent than another. It affects everybody. Just the lethality and dangerousness of it is why we take a very hard stance on it.”
Rachael Powell, chief deputy district attorney in the Fourth Judicial District, said close relationships with law enforcement can help prosecutors overcome hurdles in stalking cases.
“There are times there might be holes or things we need to bolster before we are able to charge,” she said. “But we have that back-and-forth conversation with them, because we understand how lethal that timeframe is when someone is leaving a relationship, which is typically when stalking overlaps.”
Stalking often includes lulls
It’s not uncommon for victims of stalking to experience a long break in the stalking behavior before it starts up again, said Jill Beathard, staff attorney at Project Safeguard, a nonprofit organization that helps victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and human trafficking navigate the legal system.
“They have a lull, and then the stalking behavior renews, and then they begin to feel like they are never going to be safe,” she said. “And no matter how much time passes, they never feel like it is over. That is one of the psychologically challenging things about stalking.”
Sometimes, a long pause in stalking behavior is a tactic designed to create more fear by allowing the victim to drop their guard before restarting the behavior, said Aims Babich, director of survivor services at SafeHouse Denver, an emergency shelter for survivors of domestic violence.
“Stalking itself takes time,” Babich said. “It takes energy, it takes persistence.”
A pause in the victim’s knowledge of the stalking behavior doesn’t always mean the perpetrator actually stopped, said Amy Pohl, legal director at Project Safeguard. The perpetrator may have better disguised their actions, or stalking behavior might just be less visible, like surveilling a person online.
“That is why we shouldn’t necessarily be considering gaps in behavior,” she said.
For a civil protection order, state law specifically instructs judges not to consider the timing of incidents, she noted. There is no similar instruction for criminal cases.
And although stalking is a risk factor for crimes of violence and homicide, the behavior is often misunderstood or downplayed in the legal system, Pohl and Beathard said.
“We do have a sense that judges don’t take (stalking) as seriously as they do other forms of gender-based violence,” Beathard said.
Stalking behavior can seem, on its face, innocuous, Pohl said — sending someone flowers, sending messages that are polite, or even showing up at a home unarmed and sitting outside.
Powell gave an example of a case where the suspect sent the victim roses — but had previously said he would send her roses on the day she died.
“That can make stalking more difficult to prove, because you are having to get into some of the intimate details of a relationship to show why that is threatening,” she said.
It is sometimes the larger pattern of behavior that reveals the harm, Pohl said.
“There are so many ways for people who don’t understand stalking to be able to really downplay why a reasonable person would feel fear for their safety, given the innocuous behavior that stalking can be,” Pohl said. “Especially in the case of someone who is a public figure, I wonder, too, if there is this assumption that, ‘Oh well, that is just part of the job.’ Which is not true.”
Bearse is used to the heightened scrutiny that comes from being on local TV. But the man who violated the protection order went beyond being an overzealous viewer, she said.
“People are always going to make comments about my job, what I wear, the things I do, my makeup,” she said. “I think no one, regardless of being on TV or not, should have someone follow them home and track them into their garage when they have a restraining order.
“There is an expected amount of scrutiny in this job — and this is not it.”
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