Posts Tagged ‘ sex offender ’

by Kevin Gillick

Runaway sex offender Timothy Angel (49), was arraigned in Titusville today after being caught hiding in El Salvador. Judge Jack Griesbaum ordered him held without bond on nine felony counts of failing to register with police.  Court records show he has not registered since 2006.

U.S. Marshalls apprehended Angel March 8th. He had been living  in Chalchuapa, a mountain village in central El Salvador.   Agents with the Sheriff’s Sex Offender Registration and Tracking Unit alerted the Marshall’s service in early March after receiving an anonymous tip concerning his location. Investigators believe Angel was living in Mexico prior to making his way south to El Salvador. Authorities have not determined the exact date when Angel fled the U.S.

Brevard Sheriffs issued a warrant for Angel’s arrest in 2009, when he failed to register his address as required of all convicted sex offenders in Florida.

The former construction worker has a history of noncompliance. He was sentenced to serve ten years in prison in 1994, for sexual assaults on a girl under the age of twelve. However, the court agreed to suspend the sentence and allowed Angel to serve ten years on probation. Two years later, he was back before the judge for violating the court’s restrictions and was sent to prison. He was released from custody in 2002 according to Department of Corrections records.

Judge Griesbaum scheduled a docket hearing for April 26th. Court monitors from Protect Our Children were on hand for today’s arraignment.

A sex offender is on the move and police are revising policies after an uproar at a Titusville condominium  complex. 

Residents at the Village Square Condominiums on Harrison Street,  called Protect Our Children February 8th, asking for information about Stephen Ervin: a registered sex offender living in the West Titusville community. 

That evening, a volunteer with the advocacy group appeared at the Village Square clubhouse  prior to the monthly meeting of the resident’s association.  Attendees were handed packets containing copies of Ervin’s criminal record, including details of two sexual assaults he committed against young girls.

A small group formed on the sidewalk, flipping wide-eyed through the papers.  Residents said Ervin (53) had been working as a handy-man, doing minor repairs and painting.  They said children live at the complex, which has more than one hundred units.

Ervin was released from prison in March 2010.  He was convicted of  raping a nine year-old girl in 1987 and assaulting a thirteen year-old in 1997.  Court records show he has been arrested five times for violating his probation. He served the balance of his most recent sentence in prison, and is not under supervision.

State law requires Ervin to register as a sex offender and abide by local laws restricting his residency.  Homeowners noted that a day-care facility was located on nearby Barna Avenue. 

Brevard County sex offender ordinances prohibit offenders from living within one-thousand feet of such a business.  An  investigator with Protect Our Children verified the comment, and found Kindercare, a commercial facility for children under twelve, appeared to be too close to Ervin’s residence, to comply with county law. Police were notified by telephone. 

Agents with the Sheriff’s Sex Offender Registration and Tracking unit used a computer mapping system to guage the distance between Ervin’s residence and Kindercare.  They said the distance was just over seven hundred feet…about three hundred feet short of being legal. 

The revelation caused a flurry of activity later that week between Brevard Sheriffs and the Titusville Police. Titusville has no ordinance of its own regarding sex offenders, relying on the Sheriff’s Office to cover most of the duties involving registration and tracking.  Officers in the North Brevard city verify the addresses listed by offenders when they register. They use a special “One-On-One” deployment, in which a single officer is assigned to each offender in the city. 

The Village Square affair exposed a deficiency in the system: ” One hour after we got a call from Lieutenant Todd Goodyear, we had a new policy.” said Titusville P.D. Assistant Chief, John Lau. “We realize that our people need to check the vicinity around the offender for places where children congregate.”

Goodyear heads up Sheriff Parker’s S.O.R.T. team – a group of sex crimes specialists assigned exclusively to policing sex criminals.  He worked with Titusville Police to close the gap in their monitoring procedures.

Brevard County law prohibits registered offenders from living within one thousand feet of schools, day-care facilities, parks and playgrounds.

Lau said the new policy will go in to effect immediately.   He said the  procedure requires officers to use mapping software as well as the city’s own business permit records, to assure compliance.  Police will also canvass the area around the offender’s home in order to check for child-oriented locations.

Ervin is relocating to an residence on Mt Vernon Drive, in Titusville. His registered address is due to change on February 17th.

 by Kevin Gillick

Florida child advocates are urging the state to consider an alternate source in order to fund the effort to track convicted sex offenders – sex offenders themselves. 

 “The typical child molester on our registry has had his victims in this state.” Says Titusville’s Donna Davis, “ When they grow up, those kids will begin paying taxes in Florida. That means every time victims pay sales taxes, property taxes and various fees, some small portion is paying to keep their perpetrator from doing it again.” 

Davis is a board member with Protect Our Children, Inc. The group has asked Governor-Elect Rick Scott, to set up a committee tasked with designing a “pedotax” system for the Sunshine State. The Brevard County charity suggests a program that would benefit municipal police as well as county sheriffs. 

In a letter dated November 5, the group outlined a paperless system by which offenders make regular deposits to a bank account.  Clerks in cities and counties would make quarterly withdrawals for each offender in their jurisdiction. 

The plan would allow municipalities to draw revenue if they have their own monitoring officer. “Having an officer in your town whose beat is comprised exclusively of sex offenders, is one of the best protections your children can have.” Says Mark Wigley, Executive Director of Protect Our Children, “ It is a powerful deterrent to sex criminals, knowing that down at the local cop shop, someone is keeping a light on, just for them.” 

The City of Melbourne is the only municipality in Brevard to field a full-time, compliance officer.  In place since 2005, the program narrowly missed the chopping block this year. The City Council considered dropping the program and farming out the compliance duties to regular patrol officers. In October, however, they relented and shifted the funds from other items in the budget. 

Palm Bay, Melbourne’s neighbor to the South, ended its dedicated officer program in 2009 after a three-year run. 

 “We want to encourage payment, not discourage registration. “ says Mark Wigley, “We expect them to toe the line, but we also want them to help foot the bill!”.   He said states and counties in the Southeast have already started to put the bite on registered offenders.

Indian River leads a pack of Florida counties requiring sex criminals to pony-up when they register with police. The tiny district on Florida’s East Coast, is dunning registrants $150 dollars per year. Their ordinance, passed unanimously in June 2009, takes aim at a prime reason for imposing the fee – the lack of funding:      “Whereas neither the Sheriff nor the County receives funds from the State or Federal Government to defray the costs of administering registration programs required by law…” 

The Adam Walsh Child protection act of 2006, compels all states to register sex offenders and notify citizens of their whereabouts. The mandate offers no funding to accomplish the task. Both, Lee and St. Lucie Counties now charge small processing fees to help cover their administrative costs.

 Known for its hard line on sex offenders, the State of Georgia dropped their fee program in May, after a troubled, five-year run. Georgia had been tapping sex offenders for a $250 dollar annual fee since 2006.  The failed experiment illustrates some of the pitfalls for states trying to squeeze revenue from pedophiles and rapists. 

Georgia law-enforcement officials say the system lacked any real penalties for sex offenders who failed to pay.  Registrants claiming indigence could request a hardship waiver from the local Sheriff.  Sheriffs in turn, were inclined to grant the request since none of the funds remained in the county where they were collected. 

 “The funds need to come back to the law enforcement agency that monitors the offenders” said Tonia Welch, Director of Training for the Georgia Sheriff’s Association. She said Georgia’s law called for the money to be deposited in the State’s general fund: a fiscal Black Hole which returned none of the revenue to local police. In the end, the failure of the Georgia system may be due to a simple, human impulse, to refrain from putting ones cookies in someone else’s jar. 

Sex offenders in the neighboring State of Louisiana shell out $60 –$120 dollars annually.  Unlike the Georgia system, funds are retained by the Parish Sheriff who collects them. Offenders who fail to pay can be charged with a misdemeanor, but they are never barred from registering due to lack of funds. 

 “We would like to see a system that encourages payment without discouraging registration…”, says Mark Wigley. “A program of incremental periods of incarceration like the Child Support Enforcement Program is likely to work best for deadbeats. An inability to pay should not constitute a violation of the registration laws.” 

Louisiana Sheriffs, like their counterparts in Florida, send a postcard to residents when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood. But unlike Florida, Louisiana offenders are handed a bill for the entire cost; including printing, postage and handling. 

Advocates like the idea of a system which generates its own funding:  “Although it’s unlikely sex offenders can be made to cover all the costs associated with tracking and notifying…” Donna Davis explains,  “Converting to a system that is in part, self-financed, could help provide  these protections for generations of Florida’s children.” 

Governor-Elect Scott takes office in January.

by Mark Wigley
Winter 2009

While Pete Townshend is tuning up his guitar in preparation for his appearance at the forty-fourth Super Bowl in Miami, child activists across Florida are moving to block the British sex offender from taking the stage.

“This man admitted to using his credit card to view child pornography on the internet,” says advocate Kevin Gillick. “He was a registered sex offender in the United Kingdom. Not only should he be banned from the Super Bowl, he shouldn’t be allowed in this country at all.”

Townshend, 64, one of two surviving members of the iconic rock group The Who, will perform with Roger Daltry at the event in February. CBS made the NFL’s decision public on Thanksgiving day.

Pete Townshend was arrested in 2003 after getting caught viewing multiple kiddie-porn images, including a photo of a two year-old boy being raped by an adult. He excuses the act by claiming he was doing research for a planned book on child abuse. British authorities placed Townshend on their national sex offender registry for five years. He was also “admonished” by police: a quirk of the English justice system by which offenders are brought down to the local precinct and given a “good talking to.”

Gillick dismisses Townshend’s explanation: ”Everyone knows that when you do business with a child pornographer you place an order for his next victim.”

Kevin Gillick is the editor of The Guardian-Brevard, a free newspaper which publishes photos of child molesters along with explicit coverage of their crimes. The paper is distributed in Brevard County; a community on Florida’s East Coast.

“Florida is the place where Jessica Lunsford and Junny Rios-Martinez were murdered by child predators,” he said. “It is the place where Jimmy Ryce and Adam Walsh spent their last days on earth. If the NFL goes through with this performance, they and their sponsors are going to feel the resolve of the people who live here.”

“They will be shocked,” he said. “This is going to be breathtakingly ugly”

A child advocacy group In South Florida has asked NFL Chief Executive, Roger Goodell to drop Townsend from the entertainment venue.

“I trust you will act in the best interests of your audience and advertisers in deciding to drop Townshend from the line-up…” writes Evin Daly in his letter dated November 16.

Daly is the leader of Child AbuseWatch, an internet advocacy group based in Boca Raton. His letter to Goodell points out that Townshend published a salacious story on his blog, describing teenagers having sex. The fictional tale was removed from Townshend’s site after receiving complaints from European child advocacy groups.

The official Super Bowl XLIV web site schedules the game at Dolphin Stadium, February 7, 2010.