He was a pastor and a cop in small Alaska villages. Now he’s wanted on charges he molested a teenager at his church in Florida.

A former Alaska village public safety officer and pastor who spent years in tiny Eastern Aleutian communities is now on the run after fleeing criminal charges that he molested a teenager in the Florida Keys.

Monte Chitty, 62, spent more than a decade in Cold Bay, False Pass and Akutan before he left Alaska in 2021. He then moved to Marathon, Florida, where he was the pastor of a small Baptist church.

On March 4, Chitty was arrested after being accused of molesting a 15-year-old girl who was a member of the Florida church.

Local authorities say Chitty, out on bail, didn’t show up to his April 1 court date, and hit the road in a white van.

“He’s left the Florida Keys,” Joseph Mansfield, a prosecutor with the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office, said this week. “We understand he’s heading to Alaska.”

Chitty could not be reached directly. He didn’t appear to have an attorney representing him in the case in Florida.

Former church leaders in Cold Bay remember a disturbing incident where locals pitched in to buy a woman a flight out of the remote community so she could get away from Chitty. The pastor, they said, traded on his status in the church and law enforcement to gain trust and get close to people.

“He used the two safest, most trusted roles in a community,” said Stephanie DeVault, who lived in Cold Bay when Chitty was a pastor there.

Florida charges

In March, Chitty was arrested on charges that included sexual battery involving a 15-year-old member of the small Baptist congregation he was pastoring in Marathon, a working-class island community in the Florida Keys.

According to a police report by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, the girl said she had been drunk on vodka when she passed out on a couch at the church and woke up to Chitty assaulting her.

The police report describes the girl showing officers text messages between herself and Chitty in which he admitted to giving her alcohol and graphically described the assault, noting how drunk she’d been at the time.

“You can’t even remember what I did,” he wrote.

After being confronted by police, Chitty “admitted sending the text messages” but denied the assault and asked for a lawyer, the police report said.

Chitty was arrested on charges of sexual battery of a minor and later released on $75,000 bail — paid, according to Mansfield, by members of his congregation who believed in his innocence. Prosecutors were unhappy with his release, and had asked he be taken back into custody.

“We felt he was a danger to the community,” said Dennis Ward, also a prosecutor in Monroe County.

The U.S. Marshals and local law enforcement have been notified he’s a fugitive, Ward said. Prosecutors believe he may currently be in Texas, where he is originally from.

Cold Bay, False Pass and Akutan

Monte Chitty was a pastor in Cold Bay in the early 2010s.

When he took over the church, about 50 people attended regularly — nearly every person in the tiny Alaska Peninsula town, said Ty DeVault, who had been the previous pastor. Soon, people had questions about what Chitty said about his history — the timelines didn’t make sense.

“Stories that he told about his past started not adding up,” said Stephanie DeVault.

Then came a 2012 incident in which social media private messages between him and a young woman who’d been living with the pastor and his family became public, the DeVaults said.

“It was immoral, but it wasn’t illegal,” Stephanie DeVault said.

One of the messages was so disturbing that some community members got the girl a room at an inn so she wouldn’t have to stay with Chitty, she said. People pitched in for a one-way plane ticket out of Cold Bay for her.

“We got her out because she was scared for her safety,” said Stephanie DeVault.

Afterwards, Chitty quickly spread the word to other church members that the girl was troubled and her story untrue. Many believed him, according to the DeVaults.

“There were people who honestly believed because he used the title ‘pastor’ there was no way he was capable of those things,” Stephanie DeVault said.

The incident drove a wedge in the community, Ty DeVault said. The DeVaults left soon after.

Former Cold Bay mayor Candace Nielsen remembers the era when Chitty pastored the church. The incident with the young woman leaving town “completely tore the church apart,” she said. “There were people who sided with Monte — he said it wasn’t true.”

From Cold Bay, the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association hired Chitty as a village public safety officer in False Pass, a community with an even smaller year-round population, according to the organization’s VPSO coordinator Michael Nemeth.

Village public safety officers are often the only law enforcement in small communities and are employed not by the state but by regional tribal organizations, like the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, that administer the job. They undergo different training and are often paid much less than their counterparts who work for state or municipal law enforcement agencies.

Chitty didn’t last long in the job. People in False Pass say they complained Chitty’s behavior was strange and he was a bad fit for the community, and he left less than a year later, in September 2015. He was not a pastor in the largely Russian Orthodox community of False Pass, but did hold some kind of a summer Bible camp, one resident remembered.

He left False Pass in good standing, said Nemeth.

In December 2016, he was hired as a VPSO for Akutan, an island community with a large seasonal seafood processing workforce. Chitty worked in Akutan until 2021, before “heading to Florida to buy a boat and semi-retire,” Nemeth said.

“We have no reports of sexual misconduct when he worked for us at all,” he said.

The organization is not actively investigating Chitty, Nemeth said. Chitty has no apparent Alaska criminal record.

As of Thursday, Chitty was still at large.

Reporter Tess Williams contributed to this story.