The Child Protection eNewsletter

Mothers fight back against pedophile’s web site…

Moms fearing for their children's safety are teaming up against a man who prowls playgrounds, amusement parks and fairs, stalking little girls and then brazenly boasts about his exploits on his Web site. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/ Even though Jack McClellan calls himself a pedophile, legal experts say he hasn't broken any laws. "I just think they're cute, a lot cuter than women," McClellan said.

McClellan has operated detailed Web sites rating the best public places to watch young children at play and posting photos he's taken at events. He even rated locations based on how many little girls, or LGs as he call them, are there.

"He is a reviewer, a pedophile reviewing places for other pedophiles to go," said child predator safety educator Pattie Fitzgerald, of safelyeverafter.com.

One Los Angeles mother accidentally came upon McClellan's Web site and realized that he was describing her young son who she had taken to a festival. "Immediately my skin began to crawl," said Jane, who asked that her last name not be used. "I thought this man is talking about my child. Who is this man? Why is it OK for him to speak about my child?"

And yet unlike convicted sex offenders, who are required to stay away from places that cater to children, in this case the police can do next to nothing, because this man, Jack McClellan, who has had Web sites detailing how and where he likes to troll for children, appears to be doing nothing illegal. Read More But his mere presence in Los Angeles -- coupled with Mr. McClellan’s commitment to exhibitionistic blogging about his thoughts on little girls -- has set parents on edge. One group of mothers, whose members by and large have never met before, will soon band together in a coffee shop to hammer out plans to push lawmakers in Sacramento to legislate Mr. McClellan out of business.

“Just the idea that this person could get away with what he was doing and no one could press charges has made me angry,” said Jane. She is now part of a movement to make it illegal to post images of children of any type on Web sites with sexual content or themes. “It became what I call a minor obsession of mine for the next six weeks,” she said, “to get to know his crowd and the things they talk about.”

Two months ago, Mr. McClellan said, he was more or less run out of Washington State, where he lived off and on with his parents, after the news media there and various Web sites drew attention to his activities, making him worry about his safety and that of his family. He had been posting nonsexual pictures of children on a Web site intended to promote the acceptance of pedophiles, and to direct other pedophiles to events and places where children tended to gather.

So he moved to Los Angeles, where he was born, to try to live a Southern California version of his former life. The climate was one draw, said Mr. McClellan in an interview near this reporter’s office last week. But also, “there are so many world-class children’s attractions here, Disneyland, festivals and whatnot.”

Mr. McClellan has refrained from posting pictures of children on his Web site, which was shut down by its host several weeks ago but which he intends to start again, he said, with a Dutch host. On the site, he has described fairs, festivals and other spots that he hits at least three days a week, all to the fury of parents.

It is both his actions and inactions that vex law enforcement officials here, who, while suggesting that they keep an eye on Mr. McClellan when they can, say they have no legal recourse against him. “If you look at things he has posted, he clearly is a pedophile,” said Lieutenant Thomas Sirkel, who works in the Special Victim’s Unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “Has he acted on it? I can’t say,” Lieutenant Sirkel said. “But I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and I have never seen one who has not.”

Baby left in car for 10 hours with sunroof open…

A 1-year-old girl was found strapped in a car seat, rain-soaked and covered with leaves and dirt, after her mother left her for about 10 hours with the sun roof open as a violent storm raged, police said. Read More Brandi Morgan, 25, faces criminal charges after a passer-by discovered her baby in the car in the morning. Morgan was found in an apartment across the street.

"At first, she apparently forgot she had a child because she denied it, but when we asked about the baby in the car, she said she was working and basically forgot about her baby," Commander RaShall Brackney said. Brackney said Morgan could not offer proof of employment or explain where she had been. The baby, wearing only a diaper, was treated at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh for exposure and placed in county custody.

College professor Mark Warschauer says he simply forgot his 10-month-old son Mikey was in the car. Horse groom Antonio Balta claims he didn't know the car would get hot enough to harm his 9-month-old daughter, Veronika. Read More Two hot cars. Two dead infants. Two grieving fathers. Two very different outcomes. Neither man meant to harm his child. But that doesn't always matter in the eyes of the law.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children who died of heat exhaustion while trapped inside vehicles has risen dramatically, totaling around 340 in the past 10 years. Ironically, one reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 -- they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten. Read More An Associated Press analysis of more than 310 fatal incidents in the past 10 years found that prosecutions and penalties vary widely, depending in many cases on where the death occurred and who left the child to die - parent or caregiver, mother or father:

• Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers. While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time. And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms received by dads.

• Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted. But they are jailed less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time.

Meanwhile, an Orlando, Florida mom who faces misdemeanor charges for leaving her 2-month-old son in an idling Pontiac is just the latest example of the nationwide crackdown on parents who leave their kids alone in cars and then face fines -- or worse, jail time. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291415,00.html Twelve states have laws specifically prohibiting leaving young children alone in cars, some making it a traffic violation with a penalty of a ticket and a fine, and others -- including Florida -- making it a misdemeanor, with the possible punishment being a prison sentence as well as a hefty fine.

In the case of the Orlando mother, Whitlene Loussaint, police got involved because the car with the baby boy inside was stolen in the few minutes it took Loussaint to run back into her church to grab an umbrella. The car turned up blocks from the church parking lot where it was taken, with the doors wide open and the baby unhurt.

The Florida children-in-cars law has just been amended to make it a second-degree misdemeanor to leave a youngster under 6 alone in a car for more than 15 minutes or for any amount of time if the car is running. The new regulations went into effect July 1, and if Loussaint is prosecuted, she could face 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Your car has a sensor that tells you when you've left the headlights on or the keys in the ignition. It probably has another reminding you and your passengers to buckle your seat belts, and still another that sounds when the door is ajar. Some cars even to tell you when the tires need inflating. Read More But so far, there's no standard equipment to tell you that you've left a child in the back seat.

There are products out there that could prevent most of these hyperthermia deaths. Among them:

• The Child Minder system replaces the car seat's harness clip with a "smart clip" synchronized to a key ring alarm. The unit is activated when the child is buckled in. As long as the child remains in the seat, an alarm will sound if the adult walks more than 10 feet from the automobile.

• NASA is on the verge of licensing its Child Presence Sensor, which replaces the clip with a weight-sensitive pad that fits under the car seat cushion. An alarm sounds 10 warning beeps if the driver moves too far away from the vehicle, and beeps continuously if the driver doesn't return within one minute. Engineers at the agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia developed the device after a colleague left his 9-month-old son in a hot car in May 2000.

• Volvo's flagship S80 sedan includes a Personal Car Communicator that can detect a heartbeat inside the vehicle and send a warning to the driver's wireless key fob. Volvo is marketing it as a safety option for women worried about back-seat attackers, not as a way to remind the driver of a child left behind.

In other news… 

A former school computer technician with two stepchildren and a backyard swimming pool has been charged with trying to hire a woman in Miami to let him nearly drown her two daughters for his sexual pleasure. Read More Jeff Doland, 45, of Uniontown, Ohio, was arrested in Miami after authorities said he flew there believing he was going to meet a woman who would let him "dunk" her 9- and 12-year-old daughters for $550. Florida authorities alleged Doland told the agent that "dunking" was his form of sexual gratification. He claimed that he wanted to dunk the girls and then lift them from the water when they were unconscious, authorities said.

Not all 508 sex abuse victims who settled with the Archdiocese of Las Angeles in last week’s record $660 million clergy abuse settlement were abused by priests. Read More Church teachers, sports coaches and even unpaid parochial school volunteers make up as much as 10 percent of the assailants, lawyers say.

Nine teenagers and young adults were held like prisoners in a Florida home in what appeared to be a decades-long scheme to line a woman’s pockets with the government payments she received for adopting and raising them, police say. Read More They were often handcuffed, tethered together with plastic ties and allowed to soil themselves, investigators say. They had scars on their wrists. Some had burns. None appeared to have more than a fourth-grade education, not even the adults in their 20s. All were starving.

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