TAMPA (WFLA) – New information has come out regarding the situation over the weekend when a stalker showed up at Sonya Deville’s house in Lutz.
According to a pretrial detention order, Sonya Deville was with fellow WWE superstar Amanda Sacmanno who is better known as Mandy Rose at the time Phillip A. Thomas broke into Deville’s home.
Thomas drove to Florida, parked his car at the nearby Idlewild Baptist Church, walked to Deville’s home and cut a hole in the patio screen with a knife, deputies said. After waiting for hours, he set off the residential alarm when he entered through a back sliding door.
Deville went to the door and saw Thomas with a knife in his hand and pepper spray in the other. Both women were able to flee the home and deputies were able to take Thomas into custody.
Thomas “admitted that his intention was to take (the victim) hostage” by spraying pepper spray, binding her hands with zip ties and “wrapping duct tape around her arms to prevent her from fighting back.”
“I hope that judge really, really cautious and does not let him out,” Julie Weintraub told 8 on your Side.
Weintraub is a longtime victims’ advocate, helping countless survivors of stalking and domestic violence for nearly 15 years with her organization, Hands Across the Bay.
She says stalkers find their power in threats.
“They love doing that, a lot of it is a dysfunctional relationship with the women in their lives, most often their mother but it could be anybody. They have anger toward women, or whoever their victim is. That’s what they like to do,” said Weintraub.
The State Attorney’s Motion for Pretrial Detention obtained by 8 On Your Side describes the defendant’s obsession with the wrestler and it offers new details about his plot to capture her inside her home.
For up to five years, prosecutors said Thomas sent messages to the wrestler’s social media accounts that expressed “his deserve to meet with the victim” and “of a progressively more threatening manner.”
Over time, prosecutors said he “had become more agitated when the victim did not respond.”
According to the court document, Thomas sent at least one of the messages while either walking from the Idlewild Baptist Church to the house or from “the lanai or patio itself.”
Thomas was charged with aggravated stalking, armed burglary, attempted kidnapping, and criminal mischief.
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