DEBARY -- Volusia County Sheriff’s investigators filed felony charges Nov. 20, against a 22-year-old man accused of masturbating several times while driving alongside a bus full of high school children. The incidents, which occurred over the past two weeks in DeBary, were brought to a halt when a concerned parent alerted the Sheriff’s Office after going on a morning stakeout in search of the suspect.
The parent spotted the suspect and followed his car for several miles while reporting its direction of travel to dispatchers. A short while later, a deputy stopped the car and James Richmond of Lake Mary was brought in for questioning. That launched an investigation that resulted in Richmond’s arrest on two counts of lewd or lascivious exhibition.
After investigating the latest incident, deputies discovered that suspicious episodes involving the same suspect had been occurring since early November. However, most of the previous incidents were never reported to law enforcement, Sheriff's spokesman Gary Davidson said, adding they included repeated instances of a man in a small, black car driving slowly past bus stops in DeBary and leering at girls. Several of the girls were so bothered that they reported the incidents to their parents. Some even jotted down the car’s tag number, which came back to Richmond’s 1995 black Volkswagen, Davidson said.
The lewd acts began on the morning of Nov. 3 when a man in a small black car pulled alongside a school bus traveling on U.S. Highway 17-92 in DeBary. The bus was taking students to DeLand High School, and several noticed that the man in the black car was masturbating, Davidson said. The Sheriff’s Office received the first report on Nov. 10 when a student on the same bus called 911 to report that a man in a black car was driving beside the bus and masturbating. The suspect wasn’t identified or located at that time.
A week after the Nov. 10 incident, the father of one of the students decided to follow the school bus on its morning route and look for the suspect. He spotted the suspect’s Volkswagen, and witnesses said the driver was once again masturbating.