There are few words to describe the type of day or the type of failures Jose “Chille” DeCastro experienced on Wednesday as his emergency motion for a remote appearance in his on-going fight against misdemeanor charges of molesting a police vehicle was shot down and the motions hearings he had previously demanded were held without him.
To understand the situation, we must go back a year. In the late Summer of 2025, a woman named Heather Chandler approached DeCastro with a story that she was being stalked by a police officer who had arrested her multiple times for DUI and had pulled her over when she was riding her bicycle home from a bar.
Chandler’s story was that her license was revoked and she didn’t drink when she was playing pool at the bar, however the officer was always around to stalk young women. The other side of the story seemed to be that police in the area apparently had a DUI trap in place and Chandler was pulled over as part of routine police activity.
Seeing a young woman in need, and with the help of an attractive female auditor in the general area, DeCastro made his way to be civil rights hero to the small town of Duncan, Oklahoma, in early September of 2025.
DeCastro followed up on several stories, confronted a “corrupt” canine handling police officer at his home, paraded around a police station and ultimately, took Chandler and the female auditor to the Duncan, Oklahoma police station for an “audit” of parked police vehicles.
Before DeCastro arrived in the parking lot, his female companions had a run in with a police worker who asked what they were doing when they were filming the interior of her car. She politely asked them to move away from her personal vehicle, and they ended up having a cordial interaction with no police intervention needed.
DeCastro would arrive a few minutes after the incident, livestreaming from the parking lot.
On that livestream, DeCastro explained that Oklahoma had a rash of break-ins to police vehicles that resulted in thieves obtaining unsecured police weapons. He said that it was part of his powers as an auditor to legally conduct an “audit” of the police vehicles to see if he could access the supposedly “unsecure” weapons he could see in the car.
DeCastro filmed himself pulling on the car doors of three police vehicles in an attempt to gain access to the interior of the vehicles and the weapons inside. Again, stating his idea that this was legal because he was a first amendment auditor.
He then went inside and announced what he had done. The diminutive YouTuber seemed thrilled, though police didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. A later check of the video of the parking lot by an officer who had no contact with DeCastro revealed his actual actions and probable cause for molesting a police vehicle was established.
DeCastro left town soon after the incident and he was officially charged with molesting a police vehicle and a warrant for his arrest was issued in December.
Instead of writing off Oklahoma as another state he couldn’t travel to, as it was unlikely that he’d face extradition for a low level out of state warrant, DeCastro filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in California with a demand to delay the criminal proceedings against him until the federal court ruled on his lawsuit.
DeCastro named the police officers on the scene, the police officer who filed the probable cause determination, the prosecutor and the court clerk, who turned out to be the woman who asked his female companions to move away from her private vehicle, in the lawsuit. The suit stating various conspiracy theories with the defendants working together in an effort to retaliate against his first amendment rights.
The California court denied his request to block the criminal matter and eventually punted the case to Oklahoma at DeCastro’s request.
DeCastro changed course, filing several motions demanding the recusal of the judge assigned to his prosecution and the prosecutor and demanding a challenge to the charges themselves.
His motions sat for most of the first half of the year due to a backlog in the court system and DeCastro’s failure to send the documents to the proper people. Eventually, in a backlog clearing order, the State Supreme court ordered the lower court to see what he wanted with his demands and act on them.
Judge Carrie Hixon reviewed the documents and gave DeCastro what he wanted, setting a hearing for June 3 to go over all of his motions.
This left DeCastro with a quandary. As the warrant was issued long after he had left Oklahoma, he was never brought in on the charges, arraigned or had a bond set. He had never appeared before the court, and he was really at no risk as long as he stayed in California.
However, he needed to appear in person for the June 3 court date. On Monday, the court confirmed that, as it denied a previous emergency motion to appear via telephone. The court’s reasoning was that as he had not appeared before the court previously, they had no way to verify that the person who was appearing via phone was indeed Jose DeCastro.
DeCastro tried again on Wednesday, again offering a solution that the court either allow him to appear via telephone for the June 3 hearing or the court delay the hearing until such a time that he could appear via telephone.
The court chose the third option: it held the hearing without him.
All of the filings around his Franks motion were denied. The recusal of the Judge was denied. The removal of the prosecutor was denied. DeCastro’s emergency petition for a writ of mandamus had no decision put forward as the court could find no record of DeCastro actually filing such a petition.
The documents related to DeCastro’s last minute filings are available below. They’re worth a read and may serve as a warning to those who would want to emulate DeCastro’s comedy of errors.
In the end, DeCastro remains at home and the warrant remains in place.
Despite his bravado about needing the warrant quashed so he can attend the upcoming trial of Heather Chandler, it is unlikely that the Federal Court will grant relief to DeCastro by Chandler’s July court date.
This is an on-going news story.
