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Children crawled atop the Palm Bay Fire Department’s pumper unit wearing their junior fire helmets (red ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls), and gathered more coloring books from the Palm Bay Police than their little arms could carry. The bounce house shook ceaselessly in the preowned car lot, as giggling toddlers ignored the threatening clouds that hung overhead. Inside the showroom, crisply dressed, sales people darted about, shepherding kids toward the back of the sales floor – where something deadly serious was taking place.
A group from Davie, Florida had come to help parents assemble identification data for use in case the “unthinkable” should happen to their child.
Brevard’s largest Ford dealership took time out from selling Mustangs and Fusions on Saturday, April 14th, to help local families protect their kids. Nearly two-hundred children were protected at the DNA Lifeprint Child Safety Event, when their parents were provided with identification kits to help police, in the event a child goes missing.
A five year-old cocked one eye from under the brim of his fire hat, “Will it hurt?”
Andrea Matthews smiled and patted the seat of the chair beside her. Plucking the hat from the boy’s head, she held a web cam aloft and snapped his picture. Then she rolled his little fingers carefully across the plate of a digital fingerprint scanner.
“We don’t retain any of the data.” said Matthews, “It all goes home with the parent.”
She ejected a CD from the external drive. After slipping it into the kit, she handed it to the boy’s mother: ”…The saliva swab is inside, just follow the directions.”
The mother took the boy’s hand and lead him away while he replaced his helmet sideways. She clutched the DNALifeprint kit to her chest.
About the size of an old VHS tape box, the kits contain the child’s ”Biometric” fingerprint, which can be loaded directly into the FBI database and made available instantly, to all law enforcement agencies. Along with the DNA sample, there is a High-Definition photo of the child and a journal recording the child’s physical characteristics.
Child advocate John Walsh endorses the DNA Lifeprint program which was developed by a retired Miami detective. The $6.95 cost for each kit was paid by Palm Bay Ford.
Each parent was also given a copy of the Guardian Brevard. Members of the local child safety group, Protect Our Children, distributed copies of their publication which features pictures and descriptions of local child-molesters.
Sheriff Candidate, Wayne Ivey dropped by to discuss the Amber Alert System which he helped to enhance during his tenure with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
To find out more, visit the DNA Lifeprint website: http://www.dna-lifeprint.com/
Protect Our Children has challenged the planned visit of a British sex offender scheduled to perform at a concert in May. Jimmy Pursey, a member of the Punk group “Sham 69″, is slated to appear May 25th, at a music festival called “Punk Rock Bowling 2012″, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In 2002, Pursey received a “Caution” from police in Weybridge, U.K., for committing an Indecent Assault on a teenaged girl. The British “Caution”, which has no corollary in the U.S., allows offenders to avoid trial if they agree to admit guilt and register with the police. They are also listed on the United Kingdom’s “Registry of Sexual and Violent Offenders”.
Correspondence sent to John Morton, Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.), renewed the group’s objection to the practice of granting visas to foreign nationals who have been registered as Sex Offenders in their homelands. The March 14th letter calls the practice “a slap in the face” to victims of sexual abuse.
In a response dated March 26, Deputy Director Peter T. Edge, said the Department of Homeland Security takes the allegations seriously, and has forwarded the information to the D.H.S. field office.
In 2010, the Brevard County charity joined other child-advocacy organizations in protesting Pete Townshend’s performance at the SuperBowl in Miami. The group, which informs local citizens about convicted child molesters, mailed a sex offender advisory to residents living in the vicinity of the stadium in Miami Gardens.
Immigration officials were also notified that permitting foreign sex offenders to enter the U.S., is in conflict, with the “Moral Turpitude” clause, found in American immigration law. Townshend, a member of the British rock band: The WHO, received a Caution in 1983 after his arrest for paying to access child pornography.
The United States Attorney’s Office has recognized Brevard Sheriff’s Sex Offender Registration and Tracking Unit as one of the top child-protection teams in the nation
“If I were a criminal…” said U.S. Attorney Carlos Perez, “I would not want this team investigating my case.Perez, Chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, addressed the group in Orlando, March 21: “I could not ask for a better team, they are truly saving children from horrific abuse.”
Brevard Sheriffs Agents comprise the bulk of the regional task force which investigates cases of child exploitation and child pornography in Florida’s Middle District. Last year, as part of Project Safe Childhood, the team collared 114 suspects – the largest haul of child molesters in the nation. The operation rescued eight children who were being abused, and arrested more than sixty suspects involved in kiddie-porn. Two of them had prior sex offenses, and four were engaged in interstate commerce involving sex with children.
Agents Francis Dufresne, Dan Ogden, Mike Spadafora and Vince Ziccardi were named Law Enforcement Officers of the Year. Sheriff Jack Parker said he was proud of his agents, and said the Brevard County SORT unit is recognized as one of the nation’s premier investigative units focused on crimes against children.
In 2010, SORT Agent Dan Ogden received Protect Our Children’s “ Junny Award”, for apprehending a local man, who was abusing teenagers he had accessed via the internet.
View Harvey Taylor’s 1997 Criminal File: > taylor
by Kevin Gillick
A runaway child molester is back in the Brevard County Jail after a seven-year stint as a fugitive. Harvey Wayne Taylor, 58, was booked in Brevard, March 16, one week after US Marshalls captured him in New Jersey.
Taylor was nabbed in Newtonville, New Jersey where police say he was being harbored by his adult son. He has been missing since 2004, when probation officials realized he was not living at his registered address.
Police arrested Taylor in 1997 on 338 counts of sexual abuse perpetrated on two girls. The children said he assaulted them on a regular basis for many years. One girl said she was abused from age five through fifteen and the other child said Taylor assaulted her between the ages of three and thirteen. One victim described being chained to a refrigerator, and the other child said Taylor held a gun to her head, threatening to shoot her if she did not submit to his sexual advances.
Taylor agreed to plead “Guilty” to six counts, in exchange for a fifteen year probation sentence.
Police have charged Taylor with two counts of violating his Community Control and one count of Violation of Probation. He is scheduled to be arraigned April 16th, in Titusville. His son faces charges in New Jersey for Hindering an Arrest and Harboring a Fugitive from Justice.
Taylor is the second long-term absconder to be captured in the last year. Brevard Sheriffs teamed with US Marshalls to nab the fugitive child molester, Timothy Angel in April 2011. He was captured in El Salvador after being on the run since 2006.