An associate professor of interior design at Northwestern Arizona University lost her job following her arrest on charges of allegedly stalking and harassing people she met online — including a student and two firefighters.
Melissa Ann Santana was arrested Oct. 30 and indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury for five counts of felony stalking and three counts of giving false information to law enforcement, reports the Arizona Daily Sun. In a statement to The Washington Post, one of Santana’s lawyers said, “We will defend against these charges vigorously.”
Santana, according to a criminal complaint published by the Post, used multiple fake accounts on Tinder to harass and stalk people, as well as following them over to other platforms like Facebook. She also called and texted those she stalked, and in some cases even called their workplaces.
Two of the men she harassed are firefighters. The first one, who is known as N.L. in court documents, said he had a sexual relationship with Santana for awhile after matching with her on Tinder under the name “Ann, 29”, but ultimately ended things in 2016. Then, one of his co-workers, labeled K.T. in documents, matched with her. K.T. planned to meet up with her until he learned she was the same person who was harassing N.L. He stopped contact, but she didn’t.
Both men, according to court documents, received repeated messages ranging from sentimental to sadistic on multiple platforms from Santana under false names such as “Kendall Patterson” and “Laura Towner.” At one point, she told K.T. to “be like the Granite guys and go die in a fire” in reference to the 19 members of a firefighter crew who were killed in a fire in 2013. She continued to sporadically harass both of them both online until she stepped things up a notch in the fall of 2016.
On Sept. 9, 2016, the superintendent of the fire department both K.T. and N.L. worked for got an email. “I am disgusted by the behavior of your hotshot crew when they passed through my town,” the email read. It went on to accuse the crew of having contact with the sender’s 15-year-old daughter through an unknown website, and that they invited her back to their hotel where they gave her alcohol and sexually assaulted her. The email was allegedly from a woman named “Cathy McCarthy.” She stated she would contact local newspapers with the story if she received no response. A U.S. Forest Service special agent named Sophia Fong was brought in to look at the case and she tried to send a message back to McCarthy asking for a follow-up and stressing that the allegations were being taken seriously.
There was no response. Three days later, Fong sent a second email. The message bounced back immediately as undeliverable this time. Google confirmed that no such account existed, and no such user. Fong later confirmed it was Santana who had sent the email from yet one more of her fake accounts.
The student she harassed, listed in court documents as M.G., told Fong he was getting “harassing calls from various unknown numbers, emails and posts on his personal Facebook page and on the Yelp website,” according to the criminal complaint. He met Santana once in 2014, and the harassment started a week after that. She also started a smear campaign against him as part of her cyber harassment, falsely claiming that he had a number of STDs.
Fong described in the court affidavit that she was able to use a combination of Facebook search warrants, comparisons of IP addresses, and pining GPS coordinates to determine all the accounts in question belonged to Santana.
Santana is scheduled to be arraigned Nov. 29. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.