The booming knocks on the front door heralded a new and escalating encounter with Colorado Springs police for Lisa Chase. Nearly a dozen officers from the police department’s fugitive unit wearing tactical gear had surrounded the 42-year-old woman’s home, blocking all doors and windows.

Accustomed to the protocol by now, Chase agreed when the lead police officer asked her if she wanted to remove jewelry. She turned toward her bedroom to leave her earrings and other valuables there, knowing officers could confiscate whatever she had on her after her apprehension. The officer rushed towards Chase, who is just 5-foot-2.

Chase froze. This time, with felony stalking charges pending, matters had grown more serious. Her new boyfriend, Chris Ekstrom, a firefighter, pleaded for patience and promised Chase would be compliant. “This is about as calm as we get,” the officer warned, Ekstrom said.

In all, Colorado Springs police arrested Chase four separate times for allegedly sending a deluge of threatening and profane text messages to her ex-boyfriend of 20 years, Landon Ross, and his new girlfriend, Kristin Eaton, in violation of a protection order.

Bewildered, each time Chase protested to the police, then prosecutors and even to a judge that she had nothing to do with the texts — hundreds each day — that kept pouring in.

It took Chase nearly 13 months from her first arrest at her hair salon, in November 2022, when police interrupted a customer’s styling session weeks before Thanksgiving, to convince prosecutors she was innocent. Prosecutors last month moved to dismiss her criminal charges.

Now, in a twist, her former boyfriend’s new girlfriend, Eaton, faces felony criminal charges for allegedly using an elaborate scheme through a texting app to frame Chase. The texting app made it appear Chase had been sending texts she never sent, according to court documents.

Last month, on Dec. 19, prosecutors filed an affidavit seeking the arrest of Eaton, 36, on multiple felony counts and misdemeanor counts in the alleged framing of Chase.

Eaton, who did not return messages seeking comment, was booked into the El Paso County Detention Center on Friday after she was arrested after surrendering to authorities to face two felony charges of attempting to influence public servants, one felony charge of criminal impersonation and two misdemeanor charges for creating false emergencies. She posted a $10,000 bond and was released from custody pending her trial.

It took months of pushing from Chase’s defense lawyers and her investigator before prosecutors issued subpoenas that allowed them to unravel the alleged scheme that framed Chase.

Until the dismissal of her criminal charges, Chase faced a lengthy prison sentence on felony charges of stalking and additional misdemeanor charges of harassment and violations of protection orders.

Chase said she is still recovering from the trauma of what she terms her wrongful, misguided and reckless prosecution — one her private investigator, a former El Paso County sheriff’s commander, said was horrendously flawed and a miscarriage of justice in a report he submitted to the court.

Chase said she amassed more than $60,000 in attorney fees and private investigative fees before she was able to convince prosecutors to dismiss her criminal charges. She still pays $1,100 each month to her lawyers to whittle away the costs.

“How can I celebrate when I already knew I was innocent from the get-go, and I’ve spent tons of money on my lawyers and a private investigator and even my therapist?” Chase asked. “I will not feel relief from this until there’s some justice.”

Ira Cronin, a spokesman for the Colorado Springs Police Department, defended the handling of the case.

“We certainly sympathize with anyone who has had their lives affected,” Cronin said. “These are things we take very seriously, but the level of cooperation and the level of evidence we’re able to gather always determines kind of the direction that any investigation is going to go.”

He noted that during one critical juncture, Chase’s phone was with her private investigator, which he said hampered the ability of police to inspect the device. Chase laughs at that statement, saying she and her lawyers would have been more than willing to offer up the phone for further investigation, but they constantly were met with skepticism.

She said during one of her arrests she initially balked at turning the cellphone she was carrying over to the arresting officer because the officer said that even if she gave the phone to him, it wouldn’t stop her from getting arrested.

She said her initial reluctance shouldn’t have prevented officers and prosecutors from following up with her defense lawyers later to conduct a thorough search of the phone, or from obtaining a search warrant that would have required her phone to be turned over.

“Every single time this is happening, that I’m getting arrested, they never asked me for my story,” Chase said. “It was just arrest, arrest, arrest all the time on screenshots.”

The prosecutor on the case, 4th District Deputy District Attorney Lance Johnston, did not respond to messages seeking comment. Kate Singh, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, only said that no records exist related to Chase’s prosecution, a common phrase used by prosecutors when a case is dismissed and sealed.

The arrest of Chase at her home by the police fugitive unit landed her in the Detention Center for four nights. Before she bonded out for pretrial release, sciatica pain shot from her back down through her legs. She said she resorted to bartering away her meals with other inmates to get aspirin and Tylenol to cope.

Despite believing her innocence, Chase’s lawyers advised her to consider a guilty plea when her charges were pending, because they feared that without a plea deal she would be sentenced to a minimum of six months of incarceration if convicted by a jury.

One of her lawyers, Mike Allen, said without the resources to fight back, Chase might have been wrongly convicted. He said that, based on his experience in the case, he’s sure there are indigent defendants who have been wrongly convicted after being wrongly accused of texts they never sent. He said he remains concerned that prosecutors initially fought to block the use in court of the defense’s private investigator’s report that he believed exonerated his client.

“It’s not supposed to be about worrying about trial statistics,” said Allen, who is not related to the district attorney for the 4th Judicial District with the same name. “It’s in the statute that the prosecutor acts in the interest of justice. It’s not like we’re playing football and the national championship. You need to be a little more open-minded, a little more thorough, more dynamic in your thought process instead of blindly following what was filed.”

It took the work of private investigator John San Agustin, a former El Paso County Sheriff’s Office commander hired by Chase, to prod prosecutors to uncover Chase’s innocence.

“It is my opinion that the Colorado Springs Police Department failed miserably while investigating the multiple allegations against Ms. Chase,” San Agustin wrote in a report he submitted to the court.

He said the police only relied on screen captures from the cellphones receiving the texts and never seriously attempted to acquire any physical evidence from Chase’s cellphone or those supposedly receiving the texts.

San Agustin said that when he extracted the data from all of Chase’s electronic devices, including her cellphone, he could see she had not downloaded the TextNow app used in sending the messages and had not sent the texts.

“The complete lack of an investigation and absence of any physical or digital evidence leaves no basis for the charges against Ms. Chase,” he wrote. “Seizing Ms. Chase’s mobile devices and serving a search warrant on TextNow would have revealed that Ms. Chase did not send the alleged text messages.”

Instead of welcoming his report, the prosecution in September moved to block its use during any trial, saying in one motion to the judge that the prosecutors “are challenging what science is employed by the proposed expert in rendering his opinion on the investigation.” The judge overseeing the case rejected the prosecution’s motion.

Undaunted, the defense lawyers and private investigator on their own issued subpoenas to the Canadian-based TextNow. The registering information for the download of the app showed the registering email address in one of the downloads was tied to an email address of a friend of Eaton’s whom Chase did not know.

On the eve of the trial, the defense tried to convince the prosecution they needed to review new compelling evidence that seemed to link Eaton, not Chase, to the emails. But the prosecution said they had no time to review the evidence. The prosecutor said he would take a closer look only if Chase would waive her speedy-trial deadlines.

After Chase agreed, the prosecution began looking more closely at the evidence. Prosecutors sent out additional subpoenas that showed the texting app sending the profane messages had been downloaded onto a computer Eaton had used to buy plane tickets and onto a computer in Earlville, Ill., Eaton’s hometown, where Eaton often visited.

Prosecutors, hours before they briefed Chase on Dec. 6 saying they planned to move to drop the criminal charges against her, held a meeting with Ross. Ross had been adamant that Chase was trying to ruin his relationship with Eaton by bombarding them with text messages, and had argued that Chase posed a threat to him and Eaton.

Chase said she’s angry her ex got the heads up first, potentially allowing him to thwart the arrest of Eaton.

Ross, in an interview, said he was boggled to learn authorities now believe his new girlfriend had been behind the text messages. He said he’s since broken up with Eaton and hasn’t discussed the case with her.

He speculates that Eaton became jealous when she overheard him talking fondly to his friends of the many years he spent as Chase’s boyfriend. He thinks his fond memories prompted Eaton to frame Chase to drive a further wedge between them and to exact revenge. Eaton and Chase had never met one another.

“The district attorney said I underestimated her,” Ross recalled the prosecutor saying of Eaton when Ross met with him and other investigators in December to go over the new evidence. “He said, ‘I’m going to tell you something that’s going to shock you to your core.’”

Chase and her new boyfriend, Ekstrom, say they’re still recovering from the harrowing 13-month stretch when criminal charges were pending against Chase. Ekstrom recalled that every time they turned a car into Chase’s neighborhood and saw a police car, Chase would start shaking and refuse to go home. Ekstrom would just circle the neighborhood, driving until Chase finally felt safe.

During the ordeal, they set up dashcams to constantly videotape Chase — in her car, at home — all to show she wasn’t engaging in any texting. “We wanted to be able to say, ‘Look, she wasn’t even on her phone then,’” Ekstrom recalled.

Just to be safe, Chase said she still keeps the dashcams running, even though the criminal charges against her have been dropped. She still shakes when she sees police anywhere. She still doubts police and prosecutors have gotten to the bottom of what occurred and thinks others probably were involved in setting her up.

“I will not trust the police probably ever again,” Chase said.

303-257-2601 chris.osher@gazettedev.gazette.com

ABOVE: Lisa Chase poses for a portrait in her bedroom Thursday. Over the course of a legal battle to prove her innocence, Chase became averse to leaving her home for fear she could be arrested again. Although the charges against her were dropped, she says, “I still don’t have closure.”

Parker Seibold, the gazette

Lisa Chase spent nearly 13 months proving her innocence after being arrested four times by Colorado Springs police and facing felony stalking charges.

Parker Seibold, the gazette