A man who is a registered sex offender in Wisconsin was arrested January 21 in Salt Lake City after allegedly asking an undercover officer posing as the mother of two young girls if he could have sex with the minors. Charged with six counts of enticing a minor over the Internet, the man is said to have made the online contacts using Salt Lake City Public Library computers.
The suspect was apprehended outside an apartment building whose laundry room had been designated as the meeting place for the man and the undercover officer’s fictitious daughters. The man, whom the media did not identify by name, is also suspected of indecent exposure at an Salt Lake City–area shopping mall.
“There are individuals out there who are spending quite a bit of time looking for children in various ways for sex partners. This is just one way to do it,” explained Ken Hansen, director of the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, in the January 22 Deseret News.
On Wisconsin’s registered sex-offender list until 2017, the suspect is already barred from entering public libraries in Brown County, Wisconsin, having been caught allegedly downloading pornography and conducting sexually explicit exchanges in chat rooms and on the telephone using county library equipment. He was convicted in 2001 for one of the phone calls, a year after receiving 24 months’ probation for having sex with a minor. The Wisconsin registry lists him as “noncompliant” with the terms of his parole, for which an arrest was being processed at the time of the Utah incidents.
Posted January 23, 2004.