News

Polk County, Florida, December 17, 2011

Undercover agents with the Polk County  Sheriff’s Office are packed into a rented house in an upscale subdivision near Davenport, Florida. Upstairs and down, cops in “T” shirts and jeans, sit cross-legged on beds, balancing  computers on their knees.

Arrayed around the dining room table, they scowl as they type. The look on their faces is made even more intense by the wierd glow of the LCD screens. The glossy, plastic lids of their laptops square off across the table: Viao vs Apple, Toshiba vs HP.

The week-long internet sting has not been as productive as they had hoped:  “Another one bites the dust…” a veteran detective complained.  Seated on the living room sofa, hunched over a laptop computer on the coffee table, he shakes his head and makes a sour face.  “As soon as they realize the house is in Polk County, they break off.”

One man, chatting online with a detective posing as a teen girl, offered to pay cab fare, if the child would travel to a neighboring county to meet him. Polk County, it seems, has gained a reputation as a “speed trap” for child molesters.

At 8:30 PM there are sounds other than the tapping of keyboards. Suddenly,  booming footsteps are heard from the second floor and creaking sounds emanate from the popcorn cieling above us. Heavy units from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office are on the move. It has been a seven-hour, shut-out. Now, they are restless and hungry for action.

The suspect has been traveling for hours from St.Augustine, and he is due to arrive around 9 PM.  Black vests are slipped over shoulders. and the menacing ornaments of law enforcement are hung from their bodies: Pepper spray canisters, stun guns, tasers and cuffs.  Hand guns are holstered, unholstered, checked and rechecked.

Agents move to positions near the front door. All eyes are on the single laptop set on its own table.  The screen  displays a grid of boxes, each frames the view of a different camera.  One pans the cul-de-sac street that stretches out before the sting house, others combine to cover he entire yard, front and back.

The call comes in from a patrol unit.  He’s blocks away now, and soon headlights swing around toward the street camera and slide slowly forward.  There is a flash behind he curtains of the front window as he pulls into he driveway. In the silence, someone’s knee pops.

On the first knock, the door is yanked open and agents charge forward.  From our protected place, we can hear shouted commands: “Get on the ground…Don’t move!”  There is a pile-up on the front lawn.

The suspect tried to run, and swung his fists at the officers.  One man points the stun gun at his belly and launches two darts with their coiled leads spiraling out from his hand.  He is grabbed from behind and falls backward on top of an officer.  Now he will be charged with Resisting Arrest and Battery on Law Enforcement as well as Soliciting a Child for Sex.

He flops around for a moment with the beefy forearm of an agent still wrapped around his neck.

Ten minutes later, they bring him in.  He is Richard Newell, a thirty-five, year-old man who has travelled 180 miles to meet a thirteen year-old girl.  As he is searched, plastic cuffs are attached to his ankles forming a makeshift set of shackles.  A detective waves his hands in front of his face: “Why did you resist… are you stupid?”

Newell, looking groggy and confused, will be taken to the hospital for a medical check-up before being booked into the Polk County Jail.  He is one of only seven suspects taken in this operation - a mere fraction of the numbers pulled in on previous stings.

Word is out.  Pedophiles willing to travel to have sex with a child, are steering clear of Polk County, Florida.

Nathan Williams, 38, of Lakeland, contemplates his fate.  Sheriff Grady Judd’s Cyber Crime Unit, roped him in on December 15.    

Prosecutors are upset after a Brevard judge lowered the bond for a man charged with molesting a thirteen year-old girl.

Judge Charles Roberts granted the motion to reduce bond for Jeffrey Randall Jenkins (24), a West Melbourne resident, who has been held in the Brevard County Jail since his arrest June 23rd.  The bond was lowered from $75,000 dollars to $30,000 dollars in a hearing November 28th in Viera.

“I’m disgusted!”, said Assistant State Attorney Kaylee Taylor, “This man is definitely a danger to the community.”

Taylor spoke to The Guardian moments after the hearing concluded.

Jenkins is facing trial on two counts of Lewd & Lascivious Battery on a Minor as well as one count of Lewd & Lascivious Exhibition.  Police said he initiated intercourse with the child, performed an oral act upon her and had sex with his girlfriend in front of the girl.

His fiance’ and co-defendant, Jaclynn Marsingill (25), posted bond in July, three weeks after her arrest on three counts of sexual offenses against the child. The charges stem from the same alleged incident, which occurred between June 16th and June 20th in West Melbourne.

Prosecutor Taylor told the court that Jenkins instigated the activity by promising Marsingill that he would perform oral sex on her,  each night,  for one week, if she helped him to seduce the child.

The State’s case is supported by text messages sent between the defendants. West Melbourne Police said the pair provided alcohol to the victim in order to make her pliant.

Judge Charles Roberts said Jenkins has no prior felonies on his record, and does not appear to be a flight risk. He ordered Jenkins to wear a GPS monitor and to avoid contact with the alleged victim and her family.

Jenkins is scheduled to appear in court January 4, for a docket sounding.

Members of Protect Our Children’s court monitor team were present for the hearing.

Armed with two tanks of fuel and an acrylic trophy, members of Protect Our Children headed for Polk County November 15, to present the 2011 “Junny Award” to Sheriff Grady Judd and his Cyber Crimes Unit.

Using a variety of innovative techniques, Judd’s internet cops roped in 109 suspected sex predators in 2010.

“Our people are all highly motivated because most of them have children, the same ages as the kids these people show up to abuse.” said the soft-spoken Sheriff.

His “motivated” people have arrested 246 suspects in two and one-half years, by exploiting the vulnerabilities of predators on the net. Their main tactic is to pose as children in chat rooms in order to bait pedophiles into driving to the rural county in the Eastern end of Central Florida.

Operation Child Shield II collared 50 men in April 2010, topping the 45 arrested the previous year. The investigation targeted people who were manufacturing and distributing child pornography.  Polk County detectives were able to locate and rescue eight children who were being exploited by the suspects.

In August 2010, Judd’s investigators placed an advertisement on “Craigslist” the online classified ad site.  Using language that suggested an offer of sex with young girls, fifteen men were lured to a vacant house in Polk County to be taken into custody.

Weeks later the Cyber Crime Unit arrested 44 men and women who offered sex for money to police who answered personal ads posted online.

“There is no such thing as an internet predator…they are just predators who use the internet as a means to get children.” said Kevin Gillick, President of the Brevard-based group.  “When one of these people shows up at your sting house, it is likely that some kid, somewhere, is going to make it to bed that night without being molested one of these people.”

Gillick said internet decoy tactics should be “…mainstream law enforcement everywhere.” He said each county in Florida should be arresting 200 child molesters each year using these techniques.

Vicki and Junny Rios-Marinez presented the award to Sheriff Judd, standing beside a poster of their son who was murdered in 1991 by a convicted child molester. Junny was eleven years old when he was kidnapped and killed.

“We give this award each year…”, said Mr. Rios-Martinez, “…in memory of our son and in recognition of excellent work such as you have done here.”

Protect Our Children bestows the “Junny” each year upon a Florida citizen whose work has advanced the American child-protective movement.

P.O.C. Director, Shelly Coyne was also on hand. Coyne, posing as a thirteen year-old boy on he internet, helped apprehend a sex predator in 2001. The man had been released three weeks earlier from a Tennessee prison, after serving a sentence for abusing an adolescent boy. Stephen Mathews ultimately pleaded “Guilty” to three counts of Soliciting a Minor.

Sheriff Judd promised to continue his internet dragnet campaigns.

by Kevin Gillick

Two Citrus County Sheriffs stood in the living room of a mobile home on South Snowbird Terrace, in Homosassa, talking to the occupants who rented the place by the month. A child was missing had they seen anything? Dorothy Marie Dixon shook her head. She said she lived there with her fiancé, her niece and grandson. She lied, neglecting to mention her brother, John Evander Couey.

Down the hall, in a back bedroom, a nine year-old girl crouched in a closet, ordered by her abductor not to make a sound. She didn’t.

The next day; February 27, 2005,  Jessica Marie Lunsford would be dead.

In the days that followed, a picture of the man who kidnapped and murdered the child would unfold. He was a wanted man, with a warrant for his arrest, but with no police agency searching for him. Couey was a registered sex offender who had walked away: “absconded” from his registered address.

The outrage began a revolution in the way sex offenders are tracked and monitored. State legislators passed the “Jessica Lunsford Act”: a law which not only increased the penalties for sex crimes committed against children, but set out new protocols for law enforcers in the way they manage offenders in their jurisdictions.

Cities were given options to pass ordinances pushing offenders away from schools and playgrounds, and to develop their own tracking programs. The law was like a promise made to the children of Florida, and some municipalities, like the City of Melbourne, have kept that promise.

 Gathering All The Marbles

There were two absconders in the City of Melbourne when Officer Valerie Claycomb became the Sex Offender Tracking Officer. Now, one year later, there are none. Jose Cruz had been missing for five years when an investigation by Claycomb and Agent Mike Schmidt, her counterpart at the Sheriff’s Office, located him in Puerto Rico. Federal Marshalls hauled him back in March and installed him in a “Frequent Flyer” cell.

Vigorous interface with the family of Mathew Biggs, brought an end to his seven-month run.  Biggs was persuaded to return from Georgia and surrender to Melbourne Police in May.

 No one knows when John Couey began to drift. Sometime after August 27^th 2004, the last time police verified his address, Couey began to roll like a marble around the tiny town of Homossassa. He would take a job as a mason’s helper, where he would work for a time at local elementary school. It would take nearly six months before he would close the four-mile distance between his last, registered address and his victim’s home.

“We check each of the offenders at least once every ninety days…” Says Claycomb, who monitors Melbourne’s 103 sex criminals with the help of a part-time clerical worker. “ … if we have complaints, we check more often”

By law, sex offenders in Florida must report to the sheriff twice, per year. Those designated as Sexual Predators must report four times. If they live in Melbourne they can add two: Claycomb schedules two additional appearances in her Melbourne office.

“We update everything when they come in…phone numbers, emails, next of kin, known associates, workplace.” says Claycomb, “ We even take swabs for DNA.”

Melbourne’s Sex Offender Tracking unit compiles a complete criminal history on all their charges, including details on their sex crimes. Facts about their ‘Method of Operation” (how they did what they did), are loaded into a database, so that if a child is abducted or a sex crime is committed, details on the crime can be matched with information on local sex offenders. The search for a likely suspect can begin within hours rather than days or weeks.

If law enforcement had this tool in 2005, the deputies who stood in the trailer that day, might have known they were talking to the sister of a missing child-molester. Dorothy Dixon was literally the only person in the world who would open the door and let John Couey in. His own mother, who lived near Gainesville, severed all ties with Couey in 1978, when he was caught attempting to rape his five year-old stepsister. Karen Goshe, his drug-addicted wife, had been estranged from him for nearly fifteen years.

Seamless Passage – Unified Response

The forty-six year-old drifter had been on probation for several years when he abducted Lunsford. Indeed, probation officers were the first to notice him missing from his stated residence after he failed to report to them. Three months before Jessica’s death, they asked a judge to issue a warrant for violating his probation. The warrant was promptly signed, dated and filed along with thousands of others – virtually ignored by police.

“We usually know about warrants before they are issued.” Says Claycomb. She maintains regular contact with probation officers who supervise about half of Melbourne’s sex criminals. When their sentence is complete and the iron hand of the probation officer is lifted, they pass seamlessly into the attentions of officer Claycomb.

John Couey’s probation officers had another handicap back in 2005. Though they were aware that he was placed on probation for driving drunk and possessing marijuana, they had no knowledge of his prior criminal record. In fact, he had been arrested 26 times over three decades. His criminal history included two sex offenses perpetrated upon young girls. Probation officers were not even aware that he was a registered sex offender.

Officer Claycomb is a member of the Central Florida Sex Offender Task Force, a group of law enforcement professionals who manage and supervise offenders. They meet bi-monthly to trade information on individual offenders and the train with the newest techniques for keeping registrants on a short string.

“We have representation from sheriff’s departments, municipal police, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Law Enforcement,” says Detective Robert Tyrrell.

A Specialist In Action

Tyrrell, a member of the Osceola County Sheriff’s Department, is the current Director of the Task Force. He is a strong advocate for maintaining special officers like Claycomb:

“Most departments have regular patrol officers verifying addresses in addition to their regular duties. Sex offender management works best when you have a specialized, dedicated officer assigned to the task. Patrol officers have to deal with drugs, homicides, domestic violence…and policing sex offenders is simply piled on top of these other duties.”

By the third time Citrus Sheriffs returned to Dorothy Dixon’s trailer, John Evander Couey was their person of interest. This time, investigators headed straight for the back room and saw bloodstains on Couey’s bed sheets. As they bounded down the wooden stairs, on their way to Savannah Georgia where Couey had fled, they passed within yards of the soft spot in the sand where Jessie Lunsford’s body was buried.

At that moment Couey’s registered address was still listed as Grover Cleveland Boulevard – the location he walked away from, almost six months earlier. No one informed the F.D.L.E. – the agency tasked with maintaining the state registry.

Compliance Officer Claycomb flips through her notes sitting in her tiny office at the Melbourne Police Department. “ We are averaging nearly two arrests per month.” she says. “In Melbourne, sex offenders have more contact with law enforcement than anywhere else in the county…”

Claycomb says she fields a constant flow of phone calls and emails from residents, who have questions about their sex offender neighbors. “We get tips and information from the community, which is always helpful in tracking these folks.”

The job of tracking sex offenders has come a long way since 2005, when our registry relied upon offenders themselves to provide information on their whereabouts, and open warrants were tucked away in files waiting for another arrest to awaken them. We were promised an end to a passive system where loose bolts like John Couey were left to rattle around the machinery, and competing state agencies treated information like private property.

Melbourne’s sex offender specialist leans back in her chair, just missing the boxes stacked against the wall. A modest smile breaks her crisp, professional demeanor, as she tells me about the Halloween Task Force, in which volunteer officers fan out across the City of Melbourne. While costumed children roam the streets in search of candy, they pay a face-to-face visit to each of the city’s 103 sex offenders.

The trick is in deploying specialists to police sex offenders, and the treat lies in keeping a promise to the children of Melbourne.

Read more about Melbourne Police Sex Offender Tracking Unit: http://www.melbourneflorida.org/police/melbpred.htm