Attorney: ‘It didn’t happen that way’

Published 6:36 am Sunday, November 20, 2011

A Dalton attorney representing a man who was arrested for aggravated stalking on Monday denied that the man was stalking his wife.

Todd Ray represents Gregory Alan Grammer, 40, of Rock Spring, who was charged by the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office and then released on a $2,000 bond on Tuesday.

A sheriff’s office incident report stated Grammer’s wife, Amy, told security at the Whitfield County Courthouse on Monday that he had followed her to the courthouse. She was there to talk to investigators with the district attorney’s office about him. She told Deputy Brandon Cannon that the couple were still on a family share plan on their cellphones and that he could access her events calendar information.

“It didn’t happen that way,” Ray said on Thursday. “That is so far out there that it’s really ludicrous, so far-fetched from what really happened. They got this school locked down (Westwood) and doing all this stuff based on incorrect information. The reports we have show that the district attorney’s office is involved, and instigated the shutdown based on what this Mrs. Grammer was telling them.”

Ray said what he wanted to “clarify” is that Gregory Grammer came to his office with his mother on Monday to get a number to sign up for a “transparenting” seminar, which he explained is a seminar for parents who are divorcing where a child is involved. Each parent is required to take the seminar.

“So my folks send him over to the courthouse — they couldn’t locate the divorce case number for him — to sign up for the seminar and to see if the court clerk’s office would have the case number to put on the application for the seminar,” he said. “So he and his mother walk to the courthouse from my office. … Lo and behold, who walks in and she’s … evidently telling these guys that her husband’s following her and her husband’s here at the courthouse and all this other stuff.”

Ray said Gregory Grammer and his mother came back to his office, then left to return to Rock Spring, but before leaving town decided to look for a lawn mower part he needed and turned to go toward a repair shop on North Hamilton Street and also Lowe’s on Glenwood Avenue, where he was arrested.

Ray said because of the cellphones Amy Grammer was able to “track” her husband’s movements and alerted the district attorney’s staff that he was headed toward Westwood School, where he said Gregory Grammer was involved in an incident involving his daughter last spring.

Assistant District Attorney Bert Poston said on Thursday his office did alert school officials and Whitfield 911 about Gregory Grammer on Monday afternoon. Poston would not say if Amy Grammer supplied information that led to those calls, or if a phone tracking device was used to locate Gregory Grammer’s location.

“Oddly enough, this is the second time he’s been arrested for this aggravated stalking charge,” Ray said. “And when I’m looking in the case, my expectation is I’m going to have to contact a lot of folks on Tuesday about getting a bond (for Grammer). On Tuesday morning before I start doing that I get a call from his mother saying they’ve set a bond on his case. Well, as you know, most of the time when somebody has been arrested the second time around on aggravated stalking, especially during a short period of time, he’s not going to get a bond. So oddly enough, the district attorney’s office and the investigator with the domestic violence unit have already got him a bond set before the next morning so he wouldn’t have to sit in jail.”

Ray said there is “absolutely no evidence of any kind of violence that this gentleman has ever exhibited.”

“The wife mentioned some certain things in a report about him doing this or doing that, but there has never been any evidence (of violence),” he reiterated. “The only thing is the typical ‘ex parte’ restraining order that we all do in divorce cases. Every time we have a divorce case with children involved we trot our clients over to the courthouse, get a judgment and sign off on an order that basically restrains the parties from harassing or intimidating each other or anything such as that.”

“Why anyone would have called a school and had it shut down over something like this is totally ridiculous and totally uncalled for,” Ray said.

Grammer was arrested on Nov. 2 for aggravated stalking, even though the couple had been “having contact with each other on Halloween regarding their kids,” Ray said.

Contacted on Friday, Amy Grammer said she preferred not to talk about the case without speaking first to her attorney, Randy Bates, who was out of town.

A spokeswoman with the Clerk of Superior Court office said Gregory Grammer did not yet have an appearance date on the court calendar.