- June 3, 2026
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Reading something like a terrifying movie script, the probable cause affidavit that led to the May 20 arrest of Carson Kennedy Smith of Sarasota described in explicit detail the sordid events of the 23-year-old’s alleged sexual battery of a 15-year-old Venice girl.
Smith was taken into custody by the Sarasota Police Department following an investigation into the four in-person interactions with the teen, the last leading to the alleged statutory rape of the girl who told officers she was under the heavy influence of marijuana at the time.
The pair had previously met on the online platform Snapchat, at which time Smith allegedly told the girl he was 18 years old. Over the course of several weeks, police say he drove to Venice on four occasions in his white pickup, then brought her back to his apartment at Cordelia in The Quay. He met her at a convenience store and gas station near a friend’s home, where she told her mother she was spending the night.
According to the affidavit, the three prior encounters were generally nonphysical, although the girl told investigators Smith repeatedly told her, “I don’t want to get in trouble with any parents or the law.”
On April 23, though, according to the affidavit, she said Smith picked her up for the last time and brought her back to his apartment, where they engaged in sexual intercourse.
According to Detective Amelia Wicinski of the Sarasota Police Department, the outcome could have been much worse, and the girl’s experience serves as a lesson to parents and children about potential dangers lurking online. As SPD’s in-house internet crimes against children detective in the Criminal Investigations Division, she works in both proactive and reactive capacities to help prevent inappropriate, and even dangerous, online encounters between children and adults.
“I work with the National Center of Endangered and Missing Children, so I go out in the community and I teach parents and children classes on cyber safety,” Wicinski said. “I educate the parents on kinds of parental controls and the applications that they're familiar with, but sometimes are ignorant to what their kids are exposed to.”
Wicinski is not investigating the Smith case. That is the purview of Detective Angela Cox, who interviewed the victim and her mother before determining there was probable cause to arrest the perpetrator. Cox said she believes the Venice girl may not be Smith’s only victim, and has put out a call for others, if any, to contact her.
“Because this suspect used a platform like Snapchat, there is a possibility that there were other, similar interactions with minors,” Cox told the Observer. “We want to give any possible victims a chance to come forward. Just because an application like Snapchat claims that messages and images are deleted once opened, anything sent digitally can live on forever. Be careful what you share with someone digitally or post online.”
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there are an estimated 500,000 online predators active each day, and children between the ages of 12 and 15 are especially susceptible to being groomed or manipulated by adults they unwittingly meet online.
In the case of Smith’s victim, had it been someone else, her online encounter could have resulted in human trafficking, or worse.
"When our kids go missing, whether they started off meeting somebody online and they went with that person, or they left home and then met somebody, that’s when trafficking happens," said Kevin Branzetti, co-founder and CEO of the National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF) in a statement on the organization’s website. "Some of them are slowly coerced into it, some of them are quickly pushed into it, some are physically forced into it. It's all a scam in the end, a farce to get them to become trafficked."
Although Smith’s victim wasn’t trafficked, the scenario was all too familiar.
SPD's Wicinski encourages parents to maintain awareness of any apps their children are using on their phones, laptops or tablets, study them for any direct contact functions and apply parental controls that may be available. Games, such as Roblox, are especially problematic because they open the gateway to private messaging with strangers worldwide. Although most apps include juvenile restrictions for underage users, they are easily defeated simply by the user being untruthful about their age.
Teens are often more tech-savvy than their parents about hiding their online activities. Outward indications of inappropriate interactions, Wicinski said, can include changes in behavior or social circles.
And parents shouldn’t be hesitant, she said, about exercising their authority over their children’s devices.
“I know on iPhones parents can set the location settings for the phone," she said. “Even if the child has an Instagram account and is trying to turn the location setting on, the parental controls of the phone will supersede that. Also, kids might be trying to put themselves on the map on Instagram, but the parents’ controls on the device can supersede that.”
Another troubling online trend targeting youthful victims is “sextortion.”
According to the Jacksonville office of the FBI, there was a 60% increase in reported incidents across the state in the first seven months of 2025.
Sextortion can start on any site, app, messaging platform or game where people meet and communicate, where predators ask children to send explicit photos. They then threaten to publish those images or they threaten violence to coerce the victim to produce more images. The shame of sextortion often prevents reporting of the abuse.
SPD’s Wicinski said adults who become aware of the exploitation of children by a stranger online, or who want more information on how to prevent it, can find assistance at their local law enforcement agency.
“Someone like me exists in almost every agency across the country, and we are more than willing to talk with parents about it,” she said. “I can't stress enough that if they even just have a question, or they're just not familiar with something, and they don't want to trust what their kid tells them, they're more than welcome to call someone like me and walk them through what security measures they can put in place to help.”
