A Lake County stalking case against Eugene Bartholome Gargiulo Jr., 62, centers on a tracker found on a former girlfriend and business partner’s car and other evidence investigators cited. Gargiulo, of the Village of Pine Ridge, faces a felony charge and remains free on a $5,000 bond. He denied being the man shown in surveillance footage, according to Villages-News.com.
The investigation began after the woman contacted Fruitland Park police in April, reporting that Gargiulo kept appearing where she traveled, according to Villages-News.com. A Ford dealership searched her car but did not find a tracker, the outlet reported.
Tracker Found at an Ocala Shop
On May 9, an employee at Kent's Kar Stereo & Window Tint in Ocala found a black, circular GPS tracker attached to the woman’s vehicle and turned it over to police, according to the same report.
Investigators also reviewed video from the woman’s Ring camera. It allegedly showed a bald white man kneeling beside the vehicle’s right rear bumper for nearly 30 seconds at 5:46 a.m. on May 11, near the location where the tracker was found. The report also described footage of a man on a black motorcycle looking toward her residence and a man walking slowly past her home while using a cell phone. The footage does not, by itself, identify the people shown.
Gargiulo's Explanation to Detectives
In a May 19 interview with a detective, Gargiulo acknowledged an ongoing civil dispute with the woman over business equipment; she had won the dispute on April 30, the report said. He told the detective he regularly walked through her neighborhood and lingered at her business to observe OSHA-related matters, although he did not work for OSHA, according to Villages-News.com.
Gargiulo denied that he was the person in the Ring footage, describing the man as someone “tying my shoes.” He also said he had bought a similar GPS tracker for his motorcycle, but that it went missing after a trip to Fort Lauderdale, the outlet reported.
Purchase Records and License-Plate Cameras
Records obtained by subpoena from Amazon in late July allegedly showed a $39.58 GPS-tracker purchase through Gargiulo’s account on April 24. On that date, Flock license-plate cameras recorded the woman’s vehicle and a red Chrysler sedan associated with Gargiulo traveling eastbound on County Road 466A. The cameras reportedly recorded the same pairing on April 27.
Villages-News.com reported that investigators cited the recovered tracker, purchase records, video and license-plate-camera data in connection with the charge’s upgrade to a felony this past week.
A Familiar Pattern Across Florida
Gargiulo's case lands amid a wider crackdown on tracking-device stalking in Florida. Secretly using a tracking device without consent became a felony under a state law that took effect Oct. 1, 2025, and cases have piled up since. Palm Beach County Victim Services had already served 164 stalking victims involving trackers so far in 2025, according to wcyb.com, with more than 100 charges filed statewide that year — the highest spike since AirTags hit the market, per that report.
Similar arrests have surfaced across the state in recent months. In Palm Beach Gardens, cbs12.com reported that 28-year-old Nautica Brown was arrested in November 2025 after allegedly installing a GPS tracker on her ex-girlfriend's car and was likewise released on a $5,000 bond. In Hillsborough County, a sheriff's deputy named Justin Thornsberry was arrested after detectives found a tracker on a victim's vehicle without consent, according to snntv.com. Hernando County investigators separately accused Brooksville resident David C. Vernon of stalking his ex-girlfriend for months using a car-mounted tracker, per fox13news.com, and the Martin County Sheriff's Office arrested Grant Guidry on stalking and tracking-device charges after he allegedly placed a device in a former partner's car, according to krdo.com.
For people who receive an alert about an unknown tracker, Apple says an industry standard created with Google can notify iPhone, iPad and Android users when they are being tracked. Apple advises anyone who feels their safety is at risk from a suspected unwanted tracker to contact local law enforcement, according to Apple Support. That general guidance does not establish what happened in Gargiulo’s case.
