Kyle Tasker was on his way to freedom, out of prison on a work release and living in a halfway house on North State Street in Concord.
He was nearing three years of time served for trying to lure a 14-year-old girl into a sexual encounter over Facebook. He was up for a Parole Board review for good behavior.
Then he sent a friend request to his victim’s friend.
Now, the 34-year-old former state representative has not only been denied parole, but could have additional years added to his sentence.
On Friday, state prosecutors at the Rockingham County Superior Court called witnesses to back up a “motion to impose” his full sentence, arguing that Tasker’s electronic request to the victim’s friend was as an attempt to contact the victim herself – a violation of his sentencing order. Tasked could face another seven to 15 years in prison.
But Tasker’s defense attorney Alan Cronheim said that the state had not properly connected the dots between a friend request to a friend of the victim and an attempt to actively contact that victim, and that the sentences should stand as originally outlined by the court.
The two-hour hearing centered around the implications of one early morning moment last spring but the judge did not issue an order Friday.
By April 2019, Tasker was out of prison and living in on a work release. He had been convicted in 2017 of sending encrypted, sexually explicit messages to the 14-year-old back in 2015 and 2016, and sentenced to three to seven years. But after completing a sex-offender treatment program, that sentence was reduced by six months.
That’s about when Maddie Lounsbury, now 19, received a Facebook friend request. It was 7:30 a.m. on April 26, and Lounsbury immediately recognized the name on her screen.
Lounsbury took a screenshot of her phone, alerted her father, a corrections officer himself, and the Department of Corrections took action. She did not accept the request.
Testifying Friday, Lounsbury said she assumed that the request had been sent for a reason.
“I didn’t really see a need for a friend request given everything that happened,” Lounsbury said Friday. “Why would he friend request me if not to get into contact with (the victim) through me?”
The alert set in motion a series of actions that would send Tasker back behind bars.
At the time, Tasker had been living in the halfway house, and internet and phone access had been forbidden. But when questioned by Corrections officials about the incident, he initially denied having access to Facebook, telling investigators that his mother, Diane, had access to his social media accounts while he was in prison, Andrew Newcomb, a corrections official testified Friday.
But when Diane Tasker was questioned, she rated her proficiency with Facebook at a “two or three out of ten” and said that she had not made the friend request, Newcomb testified. Tasker later admitted to sending the request himself, prompting a disciplinary report from the Department of Corrections that ended his work release.
The incident has at least jeopardized Tasker’s future success at the Parole Board. But Rockingham County prosecutors Cowal and Kristin Bartanian asked the judge to go further. While Tasker is still serving his three-to-seven year sentence for attempting to lure a minor through a computer for sexual offenses, he also received a suspended seven-to-fifteen year sentence for selling marijuana at the State House, which prosecutors would like to reinstate.
The intent of Tasker’s friend request was clear, they said. By adding Lounsbury as a Facebook friend, he could potentially have asked her to pass a message onto the victim, or used the mutual friendship on Facebook to message the victim herself.
“We have a grown man sitting in prison specifically because he contacts young women through Facebook,” Cowal said. “At his first opportunity to access it again, he chooses to go on Facebook and contact a 19-year-old girl.”
Cowal continued: “The only purpose, the only benefit that Mr. Tasker could get out of friend requesting that person, despite all he had to lose from it, the outrageous consequences he was facing for sending this one friend request – what made that worth it for him? It was because this was the only person that he knew of, the only person that he had access to, who would give him access to the victim’s Facebook account.”
But Cronheim said that because the request was ultimately not accepted, and because there was no evidence Tasker had attempted to contact the victim directly or to ask Lounsbury to contact her, the state lacked the evidence for the motion.
“They cut this off before they could have seen the intent,” he said, pointing to Lounsbury’s decision not to accept the request. “There are other reasons that there could have been contact. There’s no clear evidence.”
Addressing Tasker, who appeared in a gray fleece and handcuffs, Judge Andrew Schulman admonished the ex-lawmaker for his choices.
But he appeared less certain on the state’s case that he had violated his sentencing rules.
“My problem is the difference between ‘could,’ ‘would,’ and arguably ‘probably would’ contact (the victim),” he said. “So I have a series of what I imagine we’ll refer to as serious breaches of prison rules. Suggesting that since the time of his arrest, Mr. Tasker’s judgment has not improved one iota, sad to say.”
“I’m just not seeing intent to contact,” the judge said.
Schulman said he would issue a motion on the order in the near future.