Oviedo man arrested after following family and filming them at Walmart

Seminole County deputies arrested a 21-year-old Oviedo man after they say he followed a mother and her two daughters through a Walmart on Deep Lake Road and recorded them in a way that made the family feel targeted and unsafe.

Dylan Kyle Ouellette was charged with loitering and prowling in an unusual manner and disturbing the peace after the April 27 incident, which unfolded in the middle of a busy shopping trip. A local report says dispatch received multiple calls about a disturbance involving two men, and a deputy responded around 12:30 p.m., turning what the family described as a creeping encounter into a law-enforcement call.

According to the arrest report summarized in local coverage, a woman noticed Ouellette moving through the store with his phone pointed below waist level while he appeared to track her and her daughters. Another man later confronted Ouellette after his wife told him what was happening. Deputies say Ouellette told them he had been at the store to buy fishing gear, but began recording the woman and the girls because he thought they were cute, and he acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate.

The case became more serious after deputies found multiple recordings of other families on Ouellette’s phone, a detail that suggested the conduct was not an isolated lapse or a misunderstanding. Investigators seized the phone as evidence.

Florida law makes loitering or prowling unlawful when a person is in a place or acting in a way unusual for law-abiding people under circumstances that create a justifiable and reasonable alarm for safety. Florida’s disorderly conduct law is broad enough to cover behavior that affects the peace and quiet of witnesses. Walmart says unauthorized filming is prohibited in its stores, underscoring why the family and store personnel could treat the situation as both a privacy and safety issue.

For parents and shoppers, the warning signs in this case were plain: a stranger trailing a family, a phone held low and directed toward them, and repeated movement that made the people being followed feel watched rather than left alone. If that happens in a store, move toward employees or security right away, keep children close, and call law enforcement if the behavior continues. In this case, deputies say that sequence led to an arrest, and the incident has raised new questions about how safe ordinary errands feel when surveillance crosses into harassment.