Lisa Roose-Church

Livingston Daily

A 51-year-old man was arraigned Friday afternoon on misdemeanor charges alleging he stalked his sixth-grade teacher since 2011 by making repeated, harassing telephone calls.

Steven Matthew Kremski was arrested Thursday at the Bishop International Airport in Flint after he allegedly made two phone calls to the now-81-year-old teacher, who lives in Livingston County.

“I take no position at this time,” Kremski told the court.

Magistrate Jerry Sherwood set bond at $100,000 cash or surety and a pretrial hearing was scheduled for Feb. 29.

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“So this means I have to stay in jail?” Kremski asked a deputy who led him out of the jail room used for video arraignments.

Kremski is charged with stalking and malicious use of a telecommunications device for making “terrorizing or frightening” calls to his former teacher. The charges carry penalties of up to one year in the county jail and six months in jail, respectively.

According to the charging document, Kremski allegedly repeatedly harassed the victim between 2011 and Thursday by making phone calls that were designed to terrorize, frighten or annoy the victim.

Sgt. Mike Matich of the Unadilla Township Police Department said police interviewed Kremski, but he declined to release details of the man’s statement.

“It’s an odd case that stretches back 36 years,” Matich noted. “He is obsessed with her.”

The teacher, who is not being identified for safety reasons, said she remembers Kremski as a “unique character” who had problems as a child. She believes his fixation on her stems from the kindness she showed him as a child.

“I took the time to care enough to notice (him) and help, and I doubt there were many people in his life who did that,” she said.

The teacher also remembers Kremski being mean-spirited toward her and she was left with the impression Kremski did not like her. She thought he wanted “to ridicule me or embarrass me or hurt me.”

“It was a love-hate thing,” she said about her former student’s attitude toward her.

The teacher said she started receiving telephone calls in 2011. The person on the other end would not speak, but breathed “heavy.”

She reported the calls to her local police department, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. She wondered if officers thought she was an old woman who needed attention or someone to talk with.

“I attempted to laugh it off at first and it wasn’t getting anywhere,” she said. “It got annoying.”

As time went on, the teacher said, the phone calls became spookier. In one call, the caller — allegedly Kremski — told the teacher that he found her photograph hanging on a school wall and that he located the graves of her relatives.

The caller also whispered greetings, such as “happy Halloween” or “happy Valentine’s Day” before hanging up.

The last call, made just as police officers were heading to arrest him, “was about loving me,” the teacher said.

Matich confirmed that Kremski was “walking away from the pay-phone area” when Unadilla police arrested him with assistance from airport police.

None of the calls, the teacher said, were threatening in nature. However, the increase in the number of telephone calls and the whispered words “became more frightening,” she said.

“He called me two times (Thursday) as (officers) had started driving up there to get him,” the teacher said about Kremski. “They got him.”

Matich said Kremski’s identification as the stalker came after police interviewed the victim about people in her past. He said that interview led to police getting surveillance video of Kremski using a pay phone at the airport.

Contact Livingston Daily justice reporter Lisa Roose-Church at 517-552-2846 or lrchurch@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @LisaRooseChurch.