Kyle Tasker: ‘A disaster waiting to happen’
The criminal complaint that details the investigation and arrest of state Rep. Kyle Tasker paints a picture of a 30-year-old sexual predator attempting to seduce a 14-year-old girl with promises of alcohol and marijuana.
Police allege Tasker’s pursuit continued after they took control of the girl’s Facebook account. The Nottingham Police Department affidavit describes a series of explicit messages and pornographic videos that Tasker sent to the girl before he arranged the meeting that led to his arrest. “[W]hat you lack in skill you will make up for in enthusiasm,“ he told the officer posing as the teen.
It was not the first time Tasker had raised police suspicions. The affidavit refers to a 2013 complaint by a “concerned parent” who reported Tasker was friending young high school girls on Facebook, actions the parent viewed as suspicious and inappropriate.
Tasker’s House colleagues had their own concerns about Tasker’s fitness to represent his district. After Tasker’s arrest, Rep. Katherine Prudhomme O’Brien turned to Facebook to publicly express her apprehension.
“I, and many other representatives, have struggled for some time with Tasker and we did not passively condone his actions prior to these new charges against him being brought,” she wrote. “Recently, he came up in conversation with another representative and we both agreed that Tasker was a disaster waiting to happen.”
The Derry Republican described an incident in which Tasker ridiculed elderly residents at the county nursing home. “At a budget meeting at the county nursing home last year, I overheard Tasker making inappropriate jokes about the nursing home residents in front of the professional staff who worked with them each day. I asked him to be quiet at that meeting,” she wrote. “It came up again soon after in conversation with someone else and I complained about what Tasker said. Tasker then said he would sue me for slander.”
In a subsequent meeting with House Speaker Shawn Jasper, Prudhomme O’Brien expressed her “deep concern” that Tasker had been assigned to the House Children and Family Law Committee. Jasper, she wrote, responded by sharing “the long standing concerns he also had with Rep. Tasker.”
A statement by the three House members who represent Tasker’s district, Reps. Yvonne Dean-Bailey (R-Northwood), Joe Duarte (R-Candia) and James Spillane (R-Deerfield), called on Tasker to take “appropriate action to allow him to focus on his personal crisis.”
The posting of that statement elicited a disturbing account from a woman who said she encountered Tasker when she was homeless. “I can attest Kyle Tasker is a pervert who likes to persuade his prey with drugs and alcohol,” she wrote. “Personally experienced it myself, though I am of age along with my friends. He tried sexually soliciting us with money, drugs and alcohol. I myself was living in my car homeless at the time and Kyle had no remorse or qualms with trying to bribe me, then my friends.”
“After realizing this creeper was no friend indeed, I was and am troubled to know NH is not looking into their state reps a little better,” she wrote. “You’d have known he was a front fake, desperately trying to lure homeless & struggling women of NH…”
[Editor’s note: Facebook messages edited for spelling and punctuation.]