Volume 5, Issue 8

ChildProtectionProgram

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Volume 5, Issue 8
February 2, 2007

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Phoenix parents are waking up through the night to check on their little girls, sleeping alongside them in their beds and even using heavy furniture to block the windows. Read More Here It's all in response to the latest serial predator to stalk the Phoenix area: A brazen man who creeps into homes in the night to abduct and sexually assault young victims. "Can you think of anything that would be more serious than to have one of your children, who you believe is safe at home and in bed, taken from your home by a stranger and assaulted?" said police Sgt. Jim Markey. "This has got to be one of the more serious crimes that I would say we have worked on."

In a case that has emerged just months after arrests in two separate serial killings cases, police believe this new attacker may have tried at least five times to break into children's' bedrooms at night through a window. They have linked him to three assaults, all within a five-mile radius in a south Phoenix neighborhood thick with low-income housing.

In addition, a 6-year-old girl was abducted last week by a registered sex offender who had been staying at her home, authorities said, and she was later found walking alone on a street the next town over. Read More Here Police were searching for George Richard Horner, 26, who had been staying with the girl and her mother for three days. Horner was taken into custody without incident and was being questioned by detectives.

Shawn Hornbeck's first month of captivity involved such intense isolation and abuse that he eventually assisted his alleged captor's efforts to keep another boy hidden in his apartment, an official close to the investigation told The Associated Press. Read More Here Shawn's eventual cooperation with Michael Devlin helped keep 13-year-old Ben Ownby captive while Devlin was at work, said the official, who requested anonymity, citing a lack of authorization to speak publicly about the case.

Shawn was traumatized after his abduction in 2002 and the experience essentially tore apart the 11-year-old's identity, the official said. Over time, Shawn began to see Devlin as his protector and surrogate parent in a pattern common to many abuse victims, the official said. "He's a victim. He was kidnapped. He was taken from his parents. He was forced to live with this guy. He was forced to accommodate," the official said.

The official would not elaborate on what happened to Shawn during the 30 days, but said details of Shawn's captivity would emerge when they are used as evidence against Devlin. The 41-year-old pizzeria manager is charged with kidnapping Shawn and Ben in separate remote Missouri towns four years apart. Ben was abducted January 8. Both boys were found inside Devlin's apartment in a St. Louis suburb on January 12.

Investigators are checking for connections between Devlin and other missing-person cases in the country. On Thursday, authorities confirmed they were looking for possible connections in six cases of missing or slain children dating back to 1988, including four in Missouri, one in Minnesota and another in Illinois.

Meanwhile, authorities are investigating pictures of Shawn Hornbeck that were apparently taken during the four years the Missouri teen was missing. Read More Here One of the most disturbing of the more than a dozen images obtained by KTVI appears to show Hornbeck with his face shrouded in a red bandana pointing a gun at the camera. Investigators say the images show a "different side" of Hornbeck, and they hope that they will help them piece together the teen's puzzling disappearance. The pictures are available online at Read More Here.

The United States has launched hundreds of new investigations to combat human trafficking for prostitution and labor exploitation inside its borders, U.S. authorities have announced. Read More Here Calling human trafficking "the equivalent of modern day slavery," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales vowed on Wednesday to keep the issue a top priority for federal law enforcement agencies.

The Justice Department also has created a unit designed to pursue human trafficking cases, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Wan Kim. Justice authorities said it would be the first time the Civil Rights Division would have a team of lawyers working exclusively on human trafficking cases. The unit initially will have four attorneys experienced in prosecuting human trafficking cases.

A senior U.S. Justice Department official estimated about 15,000 victims of human trafficking arrive in the United States annually, some as young as 9-years-old, destined for jobs in brothels, as unpaid domestic servants, or in other jobs as virtual slaves.

ABC’s Good Morning America has a series on sexual predators selling American girls into prostitution. Read More Here The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that between 100,000 and 3 million American kids under age 18 are involved in prostitution and they're often targeted by sexual predators.

MySpace.com, criticized for not doing enough to protect young people on its site from sexual predators, announced it has opened access to its database of U.S. sex offenders to a center that tracks missing children. Read More Here MySpace will donate use of its database, which combines close to 50 U.S. state registries on convicted sex offenders, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The center will use the database to help law enforcement in their investigations.

The company's critics said the measure failed to address a central threat to youngsters on its network from adult sex predators who pose as teens, one they say could be fixed with steps to verify users' ages on the site as well as raise the minimum age to be a MySpace member. "Protecting children is too important for MySpace to continue taking feel-good baby steps," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement. Blumenthal heads a coalition of prosecutors from 39 U.S. states that is considering legal action against MySpace, saying the network fails to protect teens attracted to its service to share photos, blogs, music and videos. "We will consider every available option, including possible legal action, if the site continues to resist age verification," Blumenthal said in a telephone interview, adding that the parties were in ongoing discussions. See also Read More Here.

The South Dakota Senate on Wednesday refused to expel a lawmaker accused of fondling an 18-year-old legislative page in a motel bed, but voted to censure him instead. Read More Here Democratic Sen. Dan Sutton had admitted sharing a bed with the page last winter but denied groping him. The censure amounts to a public reprimand that has no effect on Sutton's legislative powers.

A woman who experts said has a rare mental disorder known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which parents create or exaggerate injury to a child to bring attention to themselves, has been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison after admitting she injected fecal matter into her infant daughter. Read More Here "I cannot in any way wrap my mind around this," Oklahoma County District Judge Jerry Bass said Tuesday. "It is beyond my comprehension."

A 43-year-old Louisiana woman charged in Collier County with aggravated child abuse for piercing the pubic area of a 13-year-old girl as a way to keep her from having sex received a year in jail Tuesday and agreed to testify against the girl’s mother, who also is charged in the case. Read More Here

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, announcing his company’s new Windows Vista operating system, emphasized the program's added security features, including special controls that allow parents to eavesdrop on their children's electronic movements and restrict the amount of time they spent on the computer. Read More Here

The death of a girl who was repeatedly beaten by her own parents has Utah lawmakers moving to invoke the death penalty against people who kill a child during the act of abuse, sexual assault or kidnapping. Read More Here The change would excuse a prosecutor from having to prove that a killer intended another's death, raising questions about whether it could overcome a court challenge.

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