Columbus man sentenced for third case of secretly photographing women in restrooms

After serving two years for identical crimes at the University of Georgia in Athens-Clarke County, a Columbus man was sentenced this week in Muscogee Superior Court for secretly photographing a woman in the women’s restroom at the Columbus Park Crossing Barnes & Noble.

Hunter Schaffer Bramlett, 25, was charged here with criminal trespass and with “eavesdropping, surveillance, or intercepting communication which invades the privacy of another” after the Sept. 17, 2016 incident at the 5555 Whittlesey Blvd. book store.

Judge William Rumer sentenced him to five years’ probation in a plea deal acknowledging Bramlett had just been released from prison after serving from April 2017 to April 2019 for the two cases in Athens, said defense attorney Victoria Novak.

After his Columbus case was resolved, Bramlett walked free Thursday from the Muscogee County Jail, where he’d been held since April 3, after serving what remained of his prison sentence at the Dodge State Prison in Chester, Ga.

Bramlett was 22 in 2015 and 2016 when he three times was charged with sneaking into women’s restrooms to photograph women using the stalls.

In the Columbus case, a woman said she was using the restroom at the Barnes & Noble when a man in a neighboring stall slid a Samsung cell phone into her stall.

She told her boyfriend, who confronted Bramlett as the suspect left the restroom, asking him why he’d been in there and what he recorded on his phone.

Bramlett ran to his car and fled, but the couple got his tag number and reported it to police, who traced the license plate to Bramlett. They arrested him that afternoon at his Linden Court home and confiscated his phone.

But before Bramlett could be prosecuted here, he had to face his earlier charges in Athens.

According to the Athens Banner-Herald, Bramlett was a student at the University of Georgia when he was arrested Oct. 29, 2015, for photographing a woman in a restroom of the campus’ physics building.

Then he was arrested again, on April 4, 2016, for an incident three days earlier at Brown Hall on campus, where a teacher’s assistant told the business manager of the Department of Comparative Literature that a man was in the women’s restroom, the newspaper reported.

The manager, a woman, went in and asked Bramlett whether he was OK, and he at first only grunted before emerging from the stall and saying, “Oh my God, this is the women’s restroom.” The manager directed him to the men’s room, but he instead left the building, according to the report.

Bramlett later surrendered to campus police, upon hearing they had a warrant for his arrest. Indicted in May 2016, he was out on bond when he committed the same offense in Columbus.

The state law against invading someone’s privacy prohibits “any person, through the use of any device, without the consent of all persons observed, to observe, photograph, or record the activities of another which occur in any private place and out of public view.”

This story was originally published April 26, 2019 at 11:56 AM.