Arizona Man Accuses Woman of Catfishing After First Date, Then the Unthinkable Happened

Thanks to social media, matchmakers and dating apps, adults looking for love are no longer restricted to only meeting potential matches out in the wild. That’s what happened earlier this month when an Arizona man and woman connected online and scheduled their first date—which ended up being his last.

Norris Taft, 52, went on a first date with Mikela Bahe, 30, on May 3 after the pair met on the MocoSpace dating app, according to news channel Local 10.

But as the date wore on, Taft vented to his nephew with frantic text messages about a classic, dating bait-and-switch: he’d been catfished. For anyone lucky enough to avoid modern dating app culture, catfishing is when someone cooks up a completely fake identity online to hook a romantic partner, or uses heavily filtered photos or those not-so-coincidental neck-up only pictures on their profile. Catfishing became so popular, MTV created a nine-season long TV series about the disturbing trend.

During Taft and Bahe’s outing, authorities said they got into an argument. Having picked the woman up in his SUV, Taft reportedly visited a dispensary in a gas station before they returned to his home.

Taft—more than once—told his nephew and other family members that Bahe did not look like the woman he was talking to on the app and wanted to end the date, according to the probable cause statement. That’s when the date took a deadly turn.

The Phoenix Police Department received reports that a man had been run over by an SUV in an apartment complex parking lot on Maryland Avenue in Phoenix, according to Fox 10 Phoenix. The man was identified as Taft, who was found critically injured. He was taken to a hospital where he later died, per Fox 10 Phoenix.

Two hours after Bahe and Taft returned to his apartment, surveillance footage allegedly captured Bahe stealing Taft’s SUV, striking him with it and fleeing the scene. She allegedly did not stop accelerating, dragging Taft under the vehicle, ABC 13 reported.

Bahe was arrested three days later boarding a shuttle heading to Flagstaff at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, according to CBS 5. She was charged on May 6 with second-degree murder, leaving the scene of an accident and theft of means of transportation.

The suspect confessed to investigators that she remembered being with Taft in Phoenix around the time of the incident, according to court documents. However, she claimed she didn’t remember what happened after they left the dispensary, even after being shown the surveillance footage.

She is being held at Maricopa County Jail on a $1 million cash bond.

To this day, Taft’s vehicle has not been found.