BENNINGTON — On a December day two years ago, then-state Rep. Kiah Morris walked into a Bennington courtroom to face the man she accused of harassing her online because of her race.

Morris, Vermont's only female African American lawmaker, complained that Max Misch had been tweeting "racially charged" words and images at her.

"I want him to leave us alone," Morris said in December 2016, when she asked a judge for a no-stalking order against Misch, according to an official recording of the hearing obtained by the Burlington Free Press. "I want to feel safe."

The Twitter posts began a series of incidents both online and around Morris' home, many involving people other than Misch, that would leave Morris and her family scared and exasperated.

Police responded to complaints by Morris or her family at least 16 times in the last two years, records show. The incidents ranged from suspicious vehicles in the nearby cemetery, to kids knocking on their doors and windows at night, to racially-charged social media posts and the words "dead dead" found on a computer.

Bennington County prosecutors declined to charge anyone with a crime.

Misch, a self-described white nationalist, told the judge that he wanted his tweets to make Morris feel uncomfortable. He had tweeted at Morris with a caricature of a black person saying a profanity-laced comment about representing white residents of Bennington.

"I just found it incongruent that you have an African American woman representing a 96 percent white district," Misch said in court, according to a recording of the hearing. "It's a joke, your honor. It’s a troll joke."

In the civil case, Vermont Superior Court Judge William Cohen ordered Misch to stay away from Morris and her son on the basis of two tweets. The no-stalking order would last a year.

Morris, however, never got her wish to feel safe.

In August 2018, the Democratic lawmaker dropped her bid for a third term in the Vermont House, and the Attorney General's Office announced it would investigate the online threats against her.

Then Morris resigned her seat entirely, saying she needed to help her husband recover from heart surgery and citing continued harassment.

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The case raised questions about how well Bennington police, and the laws they enforce, protect people from online harassment or "trolling." "Trolling" is an Internet-age term describing the practice of making provocative, deliberately offensive posts to upset someone.

Morris' decision made national news, in no small part because her experience seemed at odds with Vermont's self-image as a progressive haven.

More:VT Insights: Kiah Morris' departure after racist threats draws national attention

"Vermont has this myth that we are somehow different and better than the rest of the country," said Robert Appel, an attorney representing Morris and her husband. "Unfortunately, in this regard, I don't think we are."

Can white Vermont handle racial trolling?

Morris and her family believe the local police response should have been "more prompt and vigorous," Appel said.

Morris also believes that state laws regarding threats and hate crimes were not strong enough to protect her.

"Our system is not sufficient, and our understanding of how these terrorism tactics are used is not sufficient," Morris said. "That is a deliberate tactic — to dance on that line between saying 'I will come and punch you in the face' to 'I'm just sort of going to make you fear that something might happen should I see you.'"

More:Hate crimes in Vermont: Why police, lawyers sometimes disagree if someone crossed the line

Bennington County State's Attorney Erica Marthage said she is proud of how her office and Bennington police handled what happened to Morris.

Vermont law sees a threat as something that a "reasonable person" would find threatening, as interpreted by police, prosecutors and a jury. Marthage found the evidence failed to rise to the level of a crime.

"We looked at the law, we looked at the behavior," she said. "Rather than file a charge based on my emotion about the situation, we looked at just the facts and what we could prove."

Bennington Police Chief Paul Doucette stands by his department's handling of the Morris case.

"All of the complaints filed by Representative Morris and her husband James have been investigated appropriately and efficiently," Doucette wrote in a September news release.

Doucette did not respond to requests for an interview, and Bennington Town Manager Stuart Hurd declined to comment for this article.

Bennington police challenged over racial disparities

Bennington is a quiet town of about 15,000 people, tucked into the corner of the state near the New York and Massachusetts borders.

As of 2017, 95.9 percent of the town's population was identified as "white alone," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The "Black or African American alone" population was 1.2 percent.

"The most visible leaders we have in this community go generations back, to almost the founding of this community," Morris said. "So the diversity of voices and experiences is minute to almost nonexistent in some ways."

The Bennington Police Department has repeatedly been in the center of controversies over how the department handles race and racial bias.

On a summer night in 2013, Bennington Police Detective Peter Urbanowicz noticed a "large, African-American man" in the passenger seat of a cab that had stopped to ask for directions to a Chinese restaurant.

Urbanowicz testified that he knew officers were looking for a large, African-American man nicknamed "Sizzle," and so decided to search the passenger. The cab's passenger, Shamel Alexander, was not "Sizzle," but he did have 11 grams of heroin on him.

In 2016, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned Alexander's conviction, ruling that Bennington police lacked reasonable suspicion for the search.

But Chief Doucette brushed aside the idea that the ruling — an unusual step for the state’s highest court — was a sign that Bennington police needed to change.

"Racial profiling does not go on within this agency," Doucette told WCAX reporter Eva McKend.

University of Vermont professor Stephanie Seguino and Cornell University professor Nancy Brooks released a study of police traffic stops the following year showing that black drivers in Bennington were searched more than five and a half times as often as white drivers. The disparity was widespread, showing up in the traffic stop records of 22 of the 24 Bennington officers the professors examined.

More:Study: Vermont police stop data show racial disparities

Frustrated by the police and the town’s refusal to address bias issues, the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued the town of Bennington, the police department and Doucette.

U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford handed the civil rights advocates a crucial victory in summer of 2018, ruling that they had presented a reasonable case that Doucette and Bennington failed to train or supervise officers — and that failure amounted to deliberate indifference. The lawsuit is ongoing.

'I cannot live in fear'

Police records show a series of uncomfortable incidents that began during the 2016 election.

Morris saw the Twitter posts from Misch in August.

Two months later, someone entered Morris' home, possibly through an unlocked basement door. About 100 of her husband’s ties were missing, several of them strewn around the historic town cemetery across the street from their home, according to a police report.

Police reports show no arrests in the case.

The next day, not far from Morris and Lawton’s home, staff at the Democratic Party office in Bennington found a packet of racially-charged images that someone had slid under the door.

"My campaign sign was like front and center on the windows,” Morris said. "It just didn’t seem random."

More:Dems close office after receiving racist material

A Democratic staffer also reported a harassing phone call. No arrests were announced.

Morris and her husband installed a camera and new lock at their home and changed their daily habits.

On election day in 2016, Morris was standing outside the back door of the Bennington Fire Department, her polling place, when she saw Misch watching her.

As Misch left the polling place, he stopped and looked at Morris for about 10 seconds, according to witness statements included in police reports. Then he took a few steps away before turning toward her again.

"I have been afraid and concerned for my safety throughout this ordeal," Morris wrote in her court application for no-stalking order against Misch. "I cannot live in fear anymore."

When the incident came up in civil court, Misch denied that he had stared at Morris for any length of time. He said he was worried that Morris was electioneering too close to the polls.

Without a lawyer by his side, Misch also made disparaging statements in court about Jewish people and African Americans. He defended the image that he had posted on Twitter.

Back in the Statehouse

Morris returned to Montpelier the following January with a new committee assignment, the House Judiciary Committee, and a new resolve to speak about issues of race.

"It just put a fire in me," Morris said. She became more pointed in her critiques and gave a floor speech in support of a Black Lives Matter resolution in 2017.

"This is not a question of whether some lives matter more than others," Morris said on the House floor, "but an acknowledgment, honoring and calling out of the disparate treatment of Black Vermonters and Black Americans."

Sha'an Mouliert, a community organizer and racial justice educator from the Northeast Kingdom, was in the House chamber to hear Morris' speech.

"For me to be in the room and see a black woman representative in this state … talk about an impossible dream," Mouliert said.

Morris also proposed legislation that would require schools to change their curriculum to recognize marginalized groups, overhaul Vermont's hate crimes law, outlaw racial profiling by police and create an office to examine systemic racism in state government.

More:Hate crimes in Vermont: Four case studies on how enforcement is practiced

"We don’t have time to hold hands and slowly wait for another day," Morris said in an interview. "The day was yesterday."

The final straws

Morris's no-stalking order against Misch lasted a year, ending in December of 2017.

"About a month or two after that, I was like — you know what? I'm now able to commence my trolling," Misch told the Burlington Free Press in an interview this winter.

Morris and her husband brought Misch's social media posts to the Bennington police in late July 2018. They described him as a "local neo-Nazi."

Bennington police officer Michael Sharshon looked at the posts and said there was no crime.

"The only action Misch claimed he would do is 'troll' Morris at a rally," Sharshon wrote in a police report.

Marthage later agreed when she reviewed the case.

"They were engaging in a lot of the conversation with him," Marthage said of the social media posts. "So it was a lot of back and forth. That to me, shows a lack of fear."

Morris disputes Marthage's claim that she and her husband engaged in "a lot of back and forth" with Misch. "It's a very odd comment to make from somebody who’s supposed to be about protecting the public," Morris said.

Lawton also told the officer that when he turned on his computer, his name on his log-in screen had been replaced with the words "dead dead." Lawton and Morris took the message as a death threat, and they gave their computers to Bennington Police with the expectation that Vermont State Police experts would examine them.

But after Officer Sharshon consulted with a state police task force of computer experts, he wrote on Aug. 1 that the computers "would not be forensically analyzed."

One week later, on Aug. 7, Vermont Internet Crimes Taskforce Commander Matthew Raymond wrote a memo to clarify that state troopers were ready to examine the computer and believed it was possible to obtain evidence from an exam to advance an investigation.

"There was an impression that VT-ICAC recommended that no computer exam be conducted," he wrote. "I am writing this report to correct that impression."

Raymond added that he had tried to reach Doucette five days earlier, on Aug. 3, to speak about the case, leaving him a voicemail and sending him an email, but received no return phone call.

Morris said she spoke with Doucette on Aug. 13 and learned no action had been taken on the computers. She has described the inaction as one of the tipping points in her decision to leave public office.

On Aug. 27, Attorney General T.J. Donovan announced his office would work with the State Police and "appropriate computer forensic experts" to investigate online threats against Morris.

Leaving the Legislature

Ten days after she won the Democratic nomination for a third term as state representative, Morris announced she was dropping her campaign.

"The last two years have been emotionally difficult for many," Morris wrote on Facebook on Aug. 24. "Political discourse, and in particular within the sphere of social media has been divisive, inflammatory and at times, even dangerous."

In September, Morris and her husband reported that youths were repeatedly banging and knocking on their windows and doors at night and running off.

The police officer wrote in a report that the incidents appeared to be a "juvenile prank." Marthage declined to take action against the youths. Morris called them a strategic targeting of her home.

"It really was distressing to know that our chief of police thought it was just kids being kids,” she said.

A few days later, Morris announced she was resigning from the Legislature immediately to care for her husband after his surgery.

"We face continued harassment and seek legal remedies to the harm endured," Morris wrote on Facebook. Her page flooded with comments of support.

"What I saw was a person who stood up against all odds and went as far as she could go without doing any more damage to herself," said Mouliert, the racial justice educator.

Misch said he felt a sense of satisfaction when he saw Morris had resigned.

"I thought I won. I did it," Misch said. "I didn't threaten her whatsoever, nothing like that, and I still accomplished what I wanted here."

Morris hopes that her experiences will prompt lawmakers to take another look at the line between free speech and criminal threatening.

More:Black Vermont lawmaker Kiah Morris resigns following racial threats

Looking back, Morris has no regrets about her decision to join the Legislature and become a public figure.

But when she speaks to new legislators, Morris suggests that they learn how hate crimes work. Be prepared for doxxing, the tactic of posting someone’s personal information online to stoke harassment.

And she cautions them: Think about your safety.

The breakdown:4 things to know about Kiah Morris resignation

Contact Jess Aloe at 802-660-1874 or jaloe@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @jess_aloe. Contact April McCullum at 802-660-1863 or amccullum@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @April_McCullum.