The following story was reported by Eric S. Peterson and Sydnee Chapman of The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with St. George News. The reporting was funded with support from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

On Aug. 20, 2024, law enforcement agencies across multiple states were hunting David Gene Remley. Alerts had gone out that Remley was missing and believed to have kidnapped three children from his ex-girlfriend. 

Just days earlier, Remley had gotten into a fight with his ex, Brittney Deal, and had headbutted her so violently it knocked her unconscious. Deal got a protective order against Remley, but it didn’t stop him from picking her children up from daycare days later and taking off with them.

He was apprehended without incident in Lincoln County, Nevada, by a Nevada State Highway Patrol officer. Investigators later found out that Remley had told the children they would be going to “heaven” with him.

After the shocking arrest, news coverage noted that Remley had faced a series of previous domestic violence charges that had been dropped by prosecutors.

A prosecutor told KSL TV that Remley is a serial abuser who he had faced many times in court but bemoaned the fact that cases had to be dropped because witnesses were afraid to speak out against him.

“We have to have the witness there to actually move forward, or else the case generally gets dismissed,” Deputy Washington County Attorney Rick Erickson told KSL TV.

But The Utah Investigative Journalism Project examined a case from two years earlier that challenges the account of the prosecutor. On May 30, 2022, Remley was arrested by St. George Police at a motel for attacking and sexually assaulting his then girlfriend, Christina Kunz.

According to the police report, Remley had sexually assaulted Kunz in the room while her 5-year-old son was trying to sleep in a bed a few feet away. Kunz screamed, fought back and ran out of the room.

Remley was arrested, but a few months later prosecutors dropped all charges against him.

A court document states that: “The state motions to dismiss [the] case based on lack of witnesses.”

But Kunz, who survived the attack, was not the only witness.

Remley received multiple charges that day, including aggravated assault, rape and domestic violence in the presence of children.

He was also charged with failure to stop at command of law enforcement and disorderly conduct. These particular charges did not need the testimony of a vulnerable witness because multiple officers were present when Remley suddenly tried to flee the scene.

For over an hour that day, police body camera footage shows Remley calmly chatting with officers at the scene, giving them his side of the story and talking about how he is a “God-fearing” man and how Kunz was lying about the accusation against him now and had done so in the past. He falsely claimed that he had beat a previous accusation in court. But when an officer told him he was under arrest, it was as if a switch was flipped — Remley told police, “I’d rather be shot” and took off running.

The body cam footage shows he was tackled by multiple officers and pinned to the ground while an exasperated officer scolded him.

“You shouldn’t have ran man, listen you already fought this once in court right, man? You can’t fight the fact that you ran from us, you might be able to fight the rest of that, but you can’t fight that,” the officer said as he patted down Remley.

A couple months later, Remley was out of jail with all charges against him dropped. 

It’s unclear if those misdemeanor charges for fleeing police might have kept Remley from being in a position to later attack Deal and later kidnap her children in 2024. However, if prosecutors had pursued the felony rape and assault charges against Remley from the 2022, he could have faced prison time.

Kunz, for one, assumed prosecutors would pursue the felony charges. In fact, she assumed the case was still being prosecuted against Remley but had just been dragging through the courts.

She said she was never notified by prosecutors about testifying in the case. She learned the charges had been dropped when reporters from The Utah Investigative Journalism Project contacted her.

“This is the first I’ve heard about that,” she said.

‘I can’t run from him anymore’

Kunz knew Remley for about a decade prior to the assault at the motel. Back then he was a different person, but so was she.

“We were both in our addictions at the time,” she said.

Their lives took different paths, but she ran into him in 2021 and they reconnected. She remembered he was so positive that she almost didn’t notice at first how he not only reentered her life but completely took it over.

“The strangest thing is that it happened quickly but so quietly at the same time, I don’t know how to explain it,” she said.

First he invited himself over and then he wouldn’t leave. Then he was telling her, “I don’t want you to leave the house without me; it’s for your own protection,” Kunz recalled. Soon he was calling her kids “my kids.”

The abuse follows a pattern known to domestic violence experts as “coercive control.” It’s a pattern of often escalating control that may include sporadic episodes of violent abuse but is more often exerted by an abusive partner through threats, psychological manipulation, surveillance, limiting access to money and other forms of control.

Former Nashville police lieutenant and police training expert Mark Wynn said these offenders are most dangerous when they lose control of their partner. He said police need to be trained to know how these types of offenders “manipulate the victim and how they manipulate the police response.”

After Remley was arrested at the motel in May 2022 for rape, assault and running from the police, Kunz went to stay briefly at a domestic violence shelter. Then she began hopping from cheap hotel to cheap hotel. By then, Remley was out of jail and pursuing her wherever she went.

At one hotel, she looked out the window to make sure no one was outside. The coast seemed clear, but when she left the room, Kunz found Remley had been sleeping directly in front of her door, waiting for her to come out.

“I just can’t run from him anymore,” she said.

Meanwhile, Kunz was being investigated by the Utah Division of Child and Family Services for being an unfit mother because of her relationship with Remley. She bristled at the treatment, feeling like she was being targeted even though she was a victim. But eventually she came to appreciate the caseworker she had with the division, who helped her file a protective order against Remley and go through counseling and find stable housing.

At a Nov. 17, 2024, hearing, Kunz testified against Remley about his abuse and was granted a permanent protective order against him for herself and her children.

It was the same testimony that she would have given in the criminal case that potentially could have led to a conviction against Remley for the rape and assault case. But that case had been dismissed on July 11, 2022, when Kunz was not present to testify. She said she had no idea it was happening and no one had been in touch with her.

‘The victim basically has to come to us’

Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke said prosecutors are put in a tough spot when they don’t have a victim show up in court. He also said it’s difficult when a witness has been uncooperative in the past.

In the 2022 case, he said that it should not have been dismissed when the witness didn’t show up at the first preliminary hearing, the crucial early hearing in a case where the court decides if there is enough evidence to proceed to trial.

“Dismissing something after the first (preliminary hearing) is not our practice,” Clarke said. “We usually continue to try to reach out to the victim more.”

Clarke noted that Kunz had a similar case against Remley earlier that year, also for a fight in a hotel room. He said prosecutors only dismissed the charges after Kunz failed twice to show up to testify in the case.

“When we have to dismiss because we don’t have a victim present, there’s nothing in any system to flag it if that person gets found and it’s like, ‘Oh, now they’re ready,’” he said.

“The victim basically has to come to us and say ‘Hey, I had this case. Now I’m ready to work with you guys on it.’”

Still, he said the office could have forwarded the charges of running from the police to the Justice Court to bring against Remley.   

Clarke said the Division of Child and Family Services investigation that helped get Kunz to testify against Remley was not something prosecutors would know about, as the agency doesn’t communicate with their office.

“We would love to know that, but we don’t know what their cases are. Those are all sealed so we can’t access those,” Clarke said.

The division could not comment on specific cases, but spokesperson Josh Loftin explained that the division does work on multi-disciplinary teams with local county prosecutors and an assistant attorney general for individual cases like Kunz’s. And if a local prosecutor was unable to contact the victim for a criminal case, they could get contact information from the division if they ask for it.

“Under statute, yes, a caseworker can provide the contact information for a mother who is a victim of domestic violence,” Loftin said. “They could also choose to pass the prosecutor’s information to the mother.”

Clarke said that even if the justice court had prosecuted Remley for running from the police, it might only have added a few extra months to the probation he was already on. If prosecutors had managed to even get through to Kunz and convict Remley on the rape and assault charges, he still might not have done much prison time and may have been out in time to assault Deal and kidnap her children in the fall of 2024.

But Clarke also acknowledged that it’s possible Remley was emboldened by the fact that he frequently dodged accountability.

“We can’t climb in his head, but I suspect that he got a lot of happiness out of beating this system.”

Clarke said his office wants to do right by victims and would be happy to refile charges in Kunz’s case if she came forward. But he said with her case, it came down to a witness who had been uncooperative in the past and he said prosecutors did try to call about her preliminary hearing in 2022.

‘You can assume all you want…’

Kunz admitted that after the 2022 assault she was drifting between shelters and hotels and her phone number changed multiple times.

“That was a crazy time in my life,” she said. But she was also surprised there was no communication between the Division of Child and Family Services and prosecutors. Nor did she feel that they tried very hard to contact her.

“They never had trouble finding me when I had a warrant for my arrest,” she said.

As for previous cases, she said she didn’t have much faith in the system because she felt like she was written off.

“Because I have that previous track record, they are automatically not going to listen to my side of the story,” she said.

Wendy Garvin is the director of Unsheltered Utah, a nonprofit that works directly with homeless people, primarily along the Wasatch Front. She said police generally don’t put a lot of effort into working with homeless victims.

“There is an immediate assumption with police for any domestic violence victim that is homeless that one, they are not willing to press charges and two, that they won’t be able to track them down,” she said.

She said the problem comes down to chronic underfunding for domestic violence shelters, which means victims don’t have a settled place to stay in long enough for follow-up communications with police and prosecutors.

“The DV shelters are always full,” Garvin said.

Lawmakers recently denied a request for millions in funding for shelters and other services for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The cuts have put rape crisis centers like the Dove Center in St. George at risk of having to cut back on services to victims of sexual assault.

Garvin said police and prosecutors could do more to find homeless victims. Even without a fixed address, they often return to the same small number of shelters, food banks and other resource centers where messages can be left with advocates.

“The ‘street’ as it turns out, is not that big of a place,” Garvin said.

She also believes the biases about finding and working with homeless victims are pretty universal with law enforcement. And while the assumptions are based on a reality that they may be more difficult to find, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do.

“You can assume all you want, but at least still try,” Garvin said.

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