By Bridget Manley, publisher
Lynlee Thorne was working on her Rockingham County farm one summer day in early June when she heard the intrusive buzzing. It was back, and she could feel it overhead, flying low and hovering.
Usually, she would get up and walk inside to escape. It always followed her wherever she went on her property. It followed her children as they played outside. She knew it was watching her, a bright white light emitting from the device to assist the camera.
For weeks, that drone had stalked and harassed her and her family.
On this day, Thorne felt defiant. The drone had already been on the property multiple times that day. She went to an outbuilding while the drone followed, low and close. While she retrieved an old BB gun that she thought she could use to shoot it out of the sky, the drone waited outside, watching.
“I come out, and I’m aiming the BB gun at it, and it flies down towards me, and then retreats, and then down towards me, and then retreats, over and over again, just actively antagonizing me,” Thorne said.
Thorne and her family live on a small farm just north of Harrisonburg. The property is isolated — a quarter of a mile off any main roads, tucked away in the county’s rolling hills.
This sanctuary, though, had come to feel like a prison, and her family lived in constant fear of the buzzing and its accompanying surveillance. But because of her persistence — along with the help of a team of law enforcement, drone experts, several attorneys, some cutting-edge technology and one quick-thinking act of brilliance by her partner — Thorne secured one of the first convictions in Virginia of charges involving stalking using a drone.
Dustin Eugene Honeycutt, 39, of Rockingham County was ultimately charged with two counts of spying using an electronic device, four counts of entering a property to harass using a drone and two counts of stalking with fear of death or assault.
Honeycutt eventually pleaded guilty to six out of eight counts in Rockingham County Court on Oct. 23.
The conviction, according to drone experts, establishes a precedent for future crimes involving drones. They will use her case to help train law enforcement across the country.
Late summer 2020
It was late summer 2020 when Thorne first noticed a drone hovering over her property.
It returned repeatedly over several months, watching her and her family, coming and going.
Once, it hovered so low it could easily see inside her home and tried to land on her front porch.
That incident prompted Thorne to contact local law enforcement, but they told Thorne there was little they could do.
“To be fair, I think it’s really important to make some space for law enforcement,” Thorne said. “When new technology has come into the fold, things happen very rapidly and are unexpected…. Just thinking about how to figure out who was flying it — they weren’t equipped for that. So, I think knowing that they didn’t have a way to find that out, they didn’t have anything to offer.”
Thorne was frustrated. She didn’t feel safe in her own home. In fact, she felt harassed. Being told nothing could be done only made it worse.
But then, as mysteriously as they began, the flights stopped a few months later. She felt relief, but fear lingered. Whenever she or her family heard certain sounds, they instinctively looked to the sky.
But as time passed, Thorne and her family returned to life as usual.
Early June 2024
It began again early this summer. Thorne said she never knew from what direction the drone came because she didn’t know it was there until it was directly overhead.
It came back repeatedly, sometimes as many as five times a day. It flew above and watched as Thorne tried to fix a fence. It followed her through her orchard. Throughout the day, it would stay, watch, leave, and return 20 minutes later to repeat the terrifying process.
Thorne said the drone became more aggressive, flying within 20 feet of her and following her. At one point, she found a large piece of vinyl and painted 4-ft words: “Stop flying drone, creep.” She threw rocks, she threw a hammer, and she tried to use the BB gun, but nothing stopped it.
She and her family began to change their lifestyles, no longer going outside unless they had to. The drone began to hover outside her windows, prompting them to cover their windows with sheets.
But because law enforcement told her they could do nothing in 2020, she didn’t think calling the police would help.
“It felt almost useless to try again in 2024,” Thorne said.
On June 19, Thorne called law enforcement. Initially, she was told the same thing: nothing could be done.
She was told that, due to federal law, she could not “take it down.” Because drones are considered aircraft, it is illegal to tamper with them. Law enforcement cannot consider manipulating the controls because that is a wiretapping violation. Similarly, you cannot “jam” the signal because that is a Federal Communications Commission violation.
She couldn’t throw a hammer, shoot it out of the sky or knock it down.
Authorities told Thorne to call the FAA, but she got bounced among FAA officials in Richmond, Warrenton, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
However, something else happened on June 19 that gave authorities the clue they needed to eventually begin an investigation.
Many drones emit a Wi-Fi signal so operators can control the device. That day, while the drone hovered in the air above the family, Thorne’s partner, Ian McNally, pulled out his phone and tried to connect to its Wi-Fi.
The Wi-Fi name contained the drone’s remote ID number, which McNally was able to retrieve quickly. An RID number can help identify the device serial number and, thus, potentially identify the owner. McNally’s quick thinking gave investigators their first lead.
“Clueless, careless, curious, and criminal”
Despite only recently becoming ubiquitous, pilotless aircraft have existed since the early 1900s and have been used in wars to conduct surveillance, jam enemy signals, protect military personnel and conduct what the military calls “precision strikes.”
Charles Werner, a former fire chief of Charlottesville, began exploring drone technology after retiring in 2015.
He is now an aviation technology adviser for the Virginia Department of Aviation and the Director of DRONERESPONDERS, the largest non-profit public safety drone organization in the world. Their mission is to support public safety agencies and educate and train first responders on the use of drones.
In the right hands, drones can be useful tools. They can identify hazards and keep people out of harm’s way. They can provide real-time situational awareness, flying in to get a closer look without putting people in danger. They can deploy as soon as a 911 call is made, arrive before law enforcement and provide details. They have been used to show first responders where wounded people are in burning vehicles, assist public safety officials in seeing which way a wildfire was spreading, and help law enforcement determine that a potential hostage taker has no weapon.
But where there is good, there can often be bad. Many drone operators break federal law without even knowing, and drones are frequently used for criminal purposes.
“We have the four C’s – the clueless, the careless, the curious, and the criminal,” Werner said.
Drones have been used to drop contraband into prisons across Virginia and to help a prisoner escape from a prison in South Carolina, Werner said. In the 2023-24 football season, Werner said, more than 2,300 drone flights swept over NFL stadiums.
As with most technology, drones’ rise in use and popularity has opened Pandora’s box as amateur operators, often without any training or understanding of state and federal law.
There are regulations regarding drones and their use. All hobbyists who purchase a drone must register it with the Federal Aviation Administration. The registration fee is $5, and it can be obtained on the FAA’s website. Drones must also comply with RID, and hobbyists must carry their TRUST or Remote Pilot Certificates when they fly.
Because of his expertise in drone technology and contacts in the drone world, Werner, along with his colleague Chuck Moran, were instrumental in helping Thorne reach a conviction last October.
The drone dream team assembles
Thorne contacted the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office again on June 20. According to a probable cause statement used to obtain a search warrant provided by Thorne and verified by the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office, the drone returned several times that day.
Thorne said an investigator with the sheriff’s office, Erica Sly, began to take Thornes’s case seriously.
“She was super responsive. She was like, ‘I have never heard of anything like this or dealt with this, but this is not OK, and I want to try to help,” Thorne said.
Sly then asked Thorne if she could bring another investigator, Michael Shank, who had experience and knowledge of drones, to Thorne’s house.
That day, as they walked the property and Thorne described what was happening to her, Shank and Sly confirmed she was, indeed, a victim of a criminal behavior.
“They said, ‘Yes, this is a problem. Yes, you are being harassed, and we don’t know what to do, but we are going to try to help you,” Thorne said.
Lt. Wes Burgoyne, of the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office, said McNally’s ability to catch the RID number immensely helped the initial investigation. From there, Burgoyne said Shank conducted research to better understand the technology and laws surrounding its use.
But Thorne remembered she had a friend who might be able to help.
Thorne knew Chuck Moran with DRONERESPONDERS through her work as political director of Rural GroundGame and his work with Online Video Mastery. She knew Moran had expertise with drones and decided to reach out.
Serendipitously, Moran and his fellow DRONERESPONDERS colleague, Charles Werner, were on the phone talking about DRONERESPONDERS business when Moran received a text from Thorne. Moran relayed the information in the text, telling Werner that a drone was stalking his friend.
“We kind of talked a little bit more, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s really bad,’ and we hung up the call,” Werner said. “I came back in, sat down for about fifteen minutes, and then thought, ‘What do you mean, that’s bad, Charles? You know people.’”
Werner started making calls. He contacted the FAA. He then considered other contacts and remembered that the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) had acquired DedroneRapidResponse – a drone detection trailer from an airspace security company called Dedrone by Axon – that could track, identify, and classify drones.
Werner then contacted DJ Smith, the Virginia State Police’s senior technical surveillance agent and unmanned aerial and CUAS program coordinator. Werner told him about Thorne’s story.
According to the probable cause statement, Shank, the investigator, then received an email from Smith on July 18 offering the drone tower’s assistance in the case. Shank accepted the offer.
“Charles is just one of those guys; he just loves to help,” Moran said. “He’s a networker beyond compare.”
The drone tower resembles a small cell tower. It is placed on a trailer and can pick up drone signals, track where they have flown, and detect where they launched. The tower has optical abilities to catch images of drones in flight and capture the radio signal to provide flight activity.
The tower came to Thorne’s property on July 31. Shank was added to the software as a user so that he could be alerted when the drone came back to the property,
On Aug. 4, the drone returned. The drone clearly noticed the tower because, according to Thorne and Werner, it even circled it several times.
Yet, the drone came back three times that day, hovering above Thorne’s home while also flying past neighboring houses.
Law enforcement began using the drone’s data to create a “geofenced area.” Every time the drone entered the geofenced zone, it signaled law enforcement that it was over the property. Investigators, including Shank, received an alert when the drone turned on.
“He would get that alert and call me,” Thorne said. “He would say, ‘Hey, drone’s in the air,’ and I would say, ‘Yup, I know.’ There were multiple times when the drone was over my head, and he would call me and tell me the drone was there.”
Law enforcement officers could identify the drone and then connect it to Honeycutt as the remote pilot, but they had to establish a pattern. They had to show that it was a repeated process and that there was intent to surveil, harass and spy.
“The biggest thing for us was to get more evidence to really show where that drone was coming to, and flying to, the drone tower – that resource – was phenomenal for us,” Burgoyne said.
The tower has no markings or logos to identify its use or ownership, which helped the investigation. Over the next two weeks, Shank methodically built his case from the ground up, working with the FAA and the Virginia State Police.
The probable cause statement detailed several instances in which the tower had captured the drone “hovering, facing the small blue house,” and “the windows were visibly open on the backside at the time.” The tower captured the drone flying low in front of Thorne’s home and surrounding buildings.
While the probable cause statement noted that the drone visited other neighboring homes on its way to and from Thorne’s, “the flight pattern was mostly concentrated on and around Thorne’s property.”
On Aug. 23, the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant at Honeycutt’s home and located and seized the drone. The state police forensically compared the drone flight data with the tower data. The data matched.
An arrest is made
When Thorne was told Honeycutt was the suspect and was arrested, she was perplexed. In most stalking cases, the victim knows the perpetrator, usually because they are or were intimate partners or acquaintances.
In this case, however, Thorne only remembers meeting Honeycutt once. In September 2020, after the first set of drone incidents, Honeycutt came to her home to service her chimney.
“There was nothing contentious about it,” Thorne said.
However, they could be considered neighbors. Honeycutt lives close, less than a mile away.
Law enforcement has never been able to confirm that the same person used a drone to harass Thorne in 2020 as in 2024. In the probable cause statement, police confirmed that Honeycutt purchased the drone used to stalk and harass Thorne in early June, but they could only seize the drone in question.
But officers did see another drone on the property.
“When they conducted the search warrant for the drone that matched the serial number, they noticed a broken drone that they could not take with the search warrant they had,” Thorne said.
In the probable cause statement, law enforcement did identify the second broken drone inside the home.
In the statement, Honeycutt, who was not home at the time of the search warrant, said he used the drone for his business and admitted to flying it out of his line of sight. He did not admit to flying the drone to Thorne’s property and told investigators he did not chase people with the device.
Honeycutt did have a Part 107 license, which certifies remote pilots for commercial use.
Thorne said investigators told her that the drone had no SD card. While the drone was being used to monitor Thorne in real time, only the existing data could be used to record. The only video recorded on the drone was a portion of a flight leaving Thorne’s property to return home.
Thorne credits Investigator Shank with much of the resolution in this case.
“This case was resolved by Michael Shank,” Thorne said. “He would call me with updates, and he would ask to come out if it were a bigger update. Before we got into any updates, he always asked how I was, he always asked how my kids were, and he always told me he was going to do everything he could to figure this out.”
Burgoyne said that when considering charges, they considered what the drone did while on Thornes’s property and the number of times it returned, using local laws to convict crimes while using drones.
“We make sure we are up to date on the current laws on these things,” Burgoyne said. “So again, this is something that is kind of newer, with drones. So, we had to make sure we were up to date on the legal statutes for that.”
Honeycutt’s attorney, Aaron Cook with Cook Attorneys in Harrisonburg, told The Citizen that he could not comment on the case details, citing attorney-client privilege.
Cook said they planned to take the case to trial, but instead chose a plea offer that did not include jail time that ultimately would “satisfy [Honeycutt’s] goals in the case.”
Cook said he did not believe Honeycutt was guilty of spying while using a drone but did not elaborate.
Honeycutt pleaded guilty to six of the eight charges, ultimately being sentenced to two years in prison, all suspended on the condition that he complete one year of supervised probation. Honeycutt cannot contact Thorne or fly drones during his probationary period.
Technology flying ahead of legislation
Without the tower, Werner believes it would have been much more challenging for law enforcement to track the drone’s activity. It would have been more time intensive, and law enforcement would have had to catch Honeycutt in the act.
“Had we not had this technology, I don’t know that this problem would have been resolved as of yet,” Werner said.
“What is more difficult is that these crimes can be committed without someone being physically present,’ Werner said. “Before, if you had a peeping tom, you would be somewhere in proximity, looking in a window or bushes. Whereas here, the drone allows you to do those things with anonymity.”
Werner, Moran and other public safety officials are now working on legislation that will give more authority to detect, classify and mitigate drone activity.
“Technology almost always flies ahead of legislation,” Werner said.
Other proposed legislation in the Virginia General Assembly would take a punitive approach. If someone commits a crime while using a drone, the charge will be raised from a misdemeanor to the lowest level of a felony.
Werner said he hopes to have an opportunity to suggest a name for the legislation: Lynlee’s Law.
Werner and Moran also hope to use this case as an example for other law enforcement agencies across the country in their training and education initiatives. They plan to help law enforcement understand how to use technology and current laws to prosecute those who use drones to stalk others.
Thorne says this experience has had long-term impacts on her and her family.
“We have lived in a world where we are afraid of the sky over our heads,” Thorne said. “A drone is not a drone. A drone is a human being. That is a person who is doing that thing. They are flying it in that way. They are watching, and it is intentional and planned.”
Find out more about how to register your drone here.
Editors’ note: This article has been updated to include additional information about registering a drone with the FAA.
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