Alecia Kitts Was Drive-Stunned on the Logan Bleachers Over a Mask, Fined $350, and an Ohio Senator Later Hurled That Arrest at Anthony Fauci
LOGAN, OHIO — Alecia Dawn Kitts, 34, of Marietta, sat in the bleachers at Logan High School Stadium on the evening of September 23, 2020, without a mask on her face. A Logan-Hocking middle-school football game was underway. School Resource Officer Chris Smith, working a special-duty assignment, told her the district required a mask on school property. She said she had asthma and was not going to put one on. He told her to leave. She did not. Logan police later said that around 5:30 p.m. he told her she was under arrest for criminal trespass and ordered her to put her hands behind her back. She refused. He warned her he would use a Taser. Video recorded by spectator Tiffany Kennedy shows a struggle of nearly two minutes on the metal stands. Smith drive-stunned her once on the shoulder — the department’s own description of pressing the device to the body and pulling the trigger without firing probes — then got the handcuffs on. Fox News, reviewing the footage, reported that she dropped toward a lower row. She was charged with criminal trespass, released at the scene, and refused treatment. Resisting arrest was added later. Nobody wrote her a ticket for the mask itself.
The clip did what 2020 clips did. Kitts can be heard yelling that she was not doing anything wrong and telling Smith to get off her. A voice in the stands says someone is being tased over a mask. Her mother, beside her, pleads, “Come on, it’s just a mask.” Another spectator threatens to sue. Kitts was rooting for the visiting team from Marietta and, according to Fox, had an American-flag-patterned mask in a back pocket. Logan-Hocking athletic director Theresa Schultheiss told the Marietta Times that Kitts and her mother were the only two people, in a crowd of about 300, who were “having issues” with the state’s mask rule. Officer Smith’s own mask slipped during the struggle. Governor Mike DeWine defended the officer. People gathered outside the Logan police station in support of Smith. The district, meanwhile, took threats. The superintendent placed the school on a lockout. NBC News, The Washington Post, and 10TV all carried some piece of that split: a use-of-force video, a wave of threats, and a department that said the charge was trespass, not public health.
The case was never really about whether asthma is a medical exemption from a school rule. It was about whether a fan who will not leave a school event is a trespasser, and whether a drive-stun on a bleacher, in front of children, is how a city settles that argument. Smith was not enforcing a criminal mask statute. He was enforcing a district policy with a trespass arrest, then a pain-compliance tool, because she would not put her wrists back. Drive-stun is designed to hurt without dropping someone the way probes are designed to. Using it on metal stands, with other spectators within arm’s reach, is still a decision a supervisor has to own. Logan police said additional charges were pending against Kitts and against another woman at the scene. The file that actually went forward was hers.
A jury she asked for, and a fine she took instead
Kitts pleaded not guilty in Hocking County Municipal Court. Her lawyer moved to dismiss. A judge denied the motion. In May 2021 she rejected a plea that would have dropped the resisting count, left her with trespass, a fine, and a year of no-contact probation barring her from Hocking County school sporting events. She wanted a jury. On the eve of trial, in a September 2021 hearing, she changed her mind. Appointed Judge Michael T. Brandt took a no-contest plea to both counts. The court fined her $200 for resisting arrest and $150 for criminal trespass, plus costs, WTAP and the Logan Daily News reported. The Athens Messenger described her as tearful. No jail. No jury. No finding, in a civil courtroom, about whether the drive-stun was excessive. A no-contest plea is not an admission for every purpose, but it is a conviction. The mask order is gone. The video is not.
That would have been the end of a small municipal file if the video had stayed in 2020. It did not. On July 29, 2026, Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio sat across from Anthony Fauci at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing and used an Ohio mother at a middle-school football game as the reason he ran for office. Moreno did not need to say the name Kitts for the facts to match. He described a mother arrested outdoors over a mask rule he called stupid, blamed “idiotic politicians” for taking Fauci’s advice, and asked, in an expletive, who Fauci thought he was. Fauci’s answer, repeated through the hearing, was that on advice of counsel he was invoking the Fifth Amendment. Moreno later said the outburst was him “being nice.” The Daily Caller and The Hill both reported the exchange. A day later the clip of Kitts on the bleachers was moving again, introduced to people who had never heard of Logan, Hocking County, or Officer Chris Smith.
The fine closed her case. It did not close the department.
There is a dishonest way to tell this story, and The AEGIS Alliance is not going to use it. Kitts was not a bystander grabbed at random. Police say she refused a lawful order to leave, refused to be handcuffed, and was warned before the drive-stun. A crowd of 300 managed the same rule without a Taser. Asthma is not a legal right to occupy a school stadium after an officer has ordered you out. The other dishonest way to tell it is the one that ends at the $350. A drive-stun on a bleacher, in front of middle-schoolers, over a rule that was not itself a crime, produced threats against a school, a lockout, and a municipal conviction that never tested the force. Smith was not publicly charged. The city was not sued by Kitts in any case that reached a reported judgment. The argument stopped at a fine.
Logan police have not stopped generating force questions. On April 21, 2026, Billy J. Knisely sued the city and Officers Trent Woodgeard and Matthew Hall in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, alleging an illegal entry and excessive force at his South Mulberry Street home in September 2025 after a report that a man was slashing tires. The Logan Daily News reported that the suit landed two weeks after a Perry County man sued two other Logan officers for excessive force, and that Knisely’s complaint claims the department disciplined the officers for their conduct and language and still seeks damages and a finding of an unconstitutional custom. Chief Jerry Mellinger did not comment. Those suits are not Kitts’s case, and they do not prove Smith was wrong in 2020. They do show that a $350 no-contest plea did not settle the question of how this department uses force when someone will not comply.
The Fresno diner arrest The AEGIS Alliance covered in May 2020, when police detained a man waiting on a Mother’s Day breakfast, was the same season in a different register: a public-health order enforced as a street arrest, a video, and a political identity built on the clip. Moreno built part of a Senate career on the Logan version. Fauci, six years later, would not answer him. Kitts’s actual record is narrower than either of those uses. She was drive-stunned, she pleaded no contest, and she paid $350. The children in the stands that night are the part of the file nobody put on a campaign. They watched a Taser used over a mask, and then they watched the adults turn the footage into a hearing.
Related from The AEGIS Alliance: the Fresno Waffle Shop Mother’s Day standoff, the ugly truth about the CARES Act, the resignation of a Bethel, Ohio police chief, and more U.S. News and Police Accountability News.
