The Child Protection eNewsletter

Louisiana fifth grade students arrested on sex-in-class allegations… 

Five fifth-graders were arrested Tuesday after an investigation into allegations that students had sex in an unsupervised classroom, Union Parish Sheriff Bob Buckley said.  Read More Here  "After 44 years of doing this work, nothing shocks me anymore," Buckley said.  "But this comes pretty close."  The alleged incident took place March 27, at Spearsville School in rural north Louisiana.  Four students - two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy - were arrested on charges of obscenity, a felony.  An 11-year-old boy who was the alleged lookout was charged with being an accessory after the fact, Buckley said.

On the day the incident took place, an assembly for sixth- through 12th-graders was called to discuss a stabbing death in which a 15-year-old Spearsville student was accused.  The fifth-grade class of about 15 students normally would have been supervised by a high school teacher during that time, Buckley said.  But the teacher was at the assembly, and the class was inadvertently left unattended.  "It's not clear how long they were left alone but speculation is that it was about 15 minutes," Buckley said.  "When no teacher showed up, the four began to have sex in the class room with the other elementary students in the classroom with them."  The investigation showed that two males and two females had sex in the classroom while the 11-year-old boy acted as a lookout, Buckley said.

Police nab 28 potential pedophiles in Florida sting, 3 work at Disney… 

Police arrested 28 men in Polk County during "Operation Cyber Hawk," an undercover operation aimed at luring sexual predators out of the woodwork.  Read More Here  Cops pretended to be 13- and 14-year-old girls and boys in online chatrooms as they worked from their headquarters, a wired house called "Four Corners."  For four days, 24 hours a day, more than 50 police officers were in contact with more than 250 men from all over Florida — and even some from other countries.

“They want to prey on 13- and 14-year-old girls and that is what we found this weekend,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told FOXNews in an interview.  “The vast majority of them did confess and some of them had lame excuses.”  When the predators wanted to speak to the little girls with whom they thought they were chatting, female officers spoke on the phone, using a younger sounding voice.  The predators set up meetings with the youngsters and, when they arrived at the house for the meeting, police nabbed them.

Three of the arrested men told authorities they were employees of Walt Disney Co., which operates theme parks in the area, according to the sheriff's report.  Some were unemployed or worked as laborers; others were in food service, sales or finance.  One man said he was an IBM consultant; another a vice president for a South Florida real estate company.  They ranged in age from college students to men in their 40s and 50s.  Charges for the men ranged from soliciting a minor via the Internet and attempted lewd battery to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  Read More Here

The Disney employees were Julio Segundo, a 21-year-old intern, Richard Gaugh, a 55-year-old part-time instructor at Disney's Animal Kingdom, and Thierry Ferron, a 44-year-old electronics technician, according to the sheriff's office.  "We take allegations of this nature seriously," Disney spokeswoman Zoraya Suarez said in an e-mail.  "When we receive confirmation of these allegations, we will take appropriate action."

Texas to free more than 550 juvenile prisoners… 

Texas' troubled juvenile prison system plans to release more than 550 inmates who have completed their minimum sentences and haven't caused any trouble behind bars, officials announced Monday.  Read More Here  The inmates will be released in the coming week, as soon as agency officials are able to line up the services they will need in the community, including parole supervision and counseling, Texas Youth Commission spokesman Jim Hurley said.

The move is part of a top-to-bottom investigation of agency policies amid allegations that inmates were sexually and physically abused and employees who knew about the problems did nothing to stop it.  The system incarcerates about 4,700 offenders ages 10 to 21 who are considered the most dangerous, incorrigible or chronic.  Advocates for inmates and their families have complained that sentences are often extended for capricious reasons or in retaliation for filing grievances.

Mom offers 7-year-old daughter in sex sting… 

A Michigan woman's five children were in protective custody after she was charged with offering to let an undercover investigator have sex with her 7-year-old daughter.  Read More Here  The 33-year-old woman, from the Detroit suburb of Taylor, was arrested after bringing the girl to a hotel in Romulus, near Detroit Metropolitan Airport, where she had agreed to meet the investigator, the Wayne County Sheriff's Department said. 

The woman was prepared to offer her daughter "for pornographic photos and anything else that was available if the price was right," Sheriff Warren Evans said.  "She had indicated very clearly that that child would do whatever it was that the person who was going to meet the child wanted to do, and that she would see that the child complied.  It's a very, very disgusting case."

The woman's name was not released so the child would not be identified.  She was arraigned on five charges, including child sexually abusive behavior, illegal use of the Internet for child sexually abusive actions or materials and distribution of child sexually abusive material, sheriff's spokesman John Roach said.  She was also charged with prostitution.  The department said the woman propositioned the investigator herself and advertised online as a prostitute.

In other news… 

A Delaware jury awarded $41 million to a Navy officer who said a Roman Catholic priest sexually abused him hundreds of times as a teen.  Read More Here  Jurors awarded Cmdr. Kenneth Whitwell $6 million in compensatory damages and $35 million in punitive damages.  Whitwell, 39, claimed the Reverend Edward J. Smith raped and sodomized him more than 230 times over several years at Archmere Academy, and that church officials did nothing to stop it.  The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Bishop Michael Saltarelli and the high school were dismissed from the lawsuit last year.

A 50-year-old Toms River, New Jersey man has been charged with paying a prostitute to watch her have sex with a 12-year-old boy in a hotel room.  Read More Here  Charged are James H. Holmberg and Amanda E. Francis, 21.  Holmberg is accused of paying Francis to have sex with the boy on Oct. 22 in an Ocean Township hotel room while Holmberg watched.  According to the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, the investigation also revealed that Francis had sex with the boy previously in June 2006.  The boy and Francis knew each other, but Holmberg did not know the boy.

An Oregon man on vacation with his family is accused of putting two of his four children in a car trunk because the vehicle was too small to hold all of them.  Read More Here  Douglas Willy, 40, was arrested Saturday after police received a tip from a person who saw the family at a gas station, authorities said.  He was charged with two counts of reckless endangerment.

A judge in Georgia sentenced a man to life in prison for raping his own daughter in a cemetery.  Read More Here  The man, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of the victim, was convicted of the March 10, 2006, incident on Friday.  Just days after his daughter's 16th birthday, the man took her to a graveyard and told her to lie down.  "You're (sic) know you're old enough to date boys now," he told her.  "I'm about to break you in."

A Web site created by a pedophile is a virtual "how-to" manual, complete with the best places in western Washington state to see little girls, and tips on how to avoid getting caught by the police.  Read More Here  The site, titled "Seattle-Tacoma-Everett Girl Love," has been around for a few years.  The police know all about it, yet they say they can't shut it down because the site is legal.  "As disturbing and offensive as we find this, there's no evidence of a crime, or even suspicion of illegal activity," said Rebecca Hover of the Snohomish County Sheriff's Department.

Three teenage boys took turns raping a 12-year-old girl, filmed the assault with a mobile phone camera and showed the video to classmates, Austrian authorities announced.  Read More Here  Investigators detained the three boys, ages 13, 15, and 16, after they showed a clip of the rape to classmates at school and a student who saw it alerted authorities, police said.

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