A fugitive Florida Keys pastor accused of sexually battering one of his teen congregants last month was arrested in Texas on Friday, nearly a week after authorities say he skipped town before his scheduled first court appearance.
Monte Lavelle Chitty, 62, was tracked down in Woodsville, Texas — where his adult son lives — by members of the U.S. Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force and the Woodsville Police Department, Assistant Monroe County State Attorney Joseph Mansfield told the Miami Herald.
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Chitty lived and worked in Alaska as a pastor and village public safety officer for more than a decade in communities on the Alaska Peninsula and in the Aleutians. He was a pastor in Cold Bay and was a VPSO in False Pass and Akutan. In 2021, he moved to Marathon, Florida, where he was the pastor of a small Baptist church.
Chitty was arrested March 4 on charges of sexual battery of a child between the ages of 12 and 18, lewd and lascivious behavior and contributing to the delinquency of a child.
He was released March 25 after members of his congregation posted his $75,000 bond, Mansfield said. The state attorney’s office had been trying to get the judge on the case to issue a higher bond after prosecutors listened to jailhouse phone calls between Chitty and his wife where he told her to pack up their trailer and clean out their bank accounts, Mansfield said.
Sheriff’s office spokesman Adam Linhardt said Chitty was apprehended around 5 p.m. Friday after he approached a Texas church group that was working with homeless people. A member of that group called police. Chitty is being held in Texas on a $1.3 million bond while he awaits extradition to the Keys, Linhardt said.
The accusations
According to the sheriff’s office, Chitty plied the 15-year-old girl with alcohol and molested her while she was passed out March 3 on a couch inside his church, First Baptist, 200 62nd St. in the Marathon.
Deputies said they found text messages on both the girl’s phone and Chitty’s phone in which “Chitty made reference to having sexual relations with the girl while she was impaired,” said Becky Herrin, another sheriff’s office spokesperson, at the time of his March 4 arrest.
The case first came to deputies’ attention, however, the day before when an anonymous caller told the sheriff’s office they had overheard the girl tell an adult she had been raped. The caller said the girl then boarded a dinghy with her grandmother and headed out to the boat where they live in an offshore mooring field.
Just as deputies were trying to find the victim, Chitty called the sheriff’s office saying “he believed he was about to be accused of something and he wanted to get ahead of it,” Herrin said.
Chitty said a young girl at his church had been drinking and passed out on a couch in the church’s library.
“He said he helped her to lie down on the couch but did not touch her after that,” Herrin said.
When deputies found the girl on her boat, she said Chitty gave her alcohol, and that she thought it might have been spiked with something else.
“She said she immediately began to feel weak and lost consciousness,” Herrin said. “She said when she woke up, she found Chitty sexually molesting her.”
Before Chitty came to Florida in 2021, he spent more than a decade in rural Alaska communities. In Cold Bay, he was accused of acting inappropriately with a young woman in his congregation — an incident that a former member of the church told the Anchorage Daily News was “immoral but not illegal.”
The episode ended with the woman leaving town and the congregation divided as to Chitty’s innocence, the Daily News reported.