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Teacher sex bust no surprise to police
by George Wiley
When Bishop Montgomery high school teacher Mark McGuiness showed up at Avenue G and Prospect Ave. in Redondo Beach last week, he allegedly thought he'd be meeting a sexually active13-year-old girl he'd contacted over the Internet. Instead, McGuiness found himself facing a couple of Redondo detectives considerably older than 13.
Redondo detective Tom Eskridge, who had helped set up the Internet sting operation that allegedly attracted McGuiness , said the volleyball coach and history teacher was shocked to see police when he arrived for the meeting with the girl, with whom, police say, McGuiness had hoped to have sex.
Later, one acquaintance of McGuiness's expressed his surprise at the arrest of the popular coach and history teacher. "I was in shock," said Mark Waronek, vice president of the Bishop Montgomery alumni association, who also does sports broadcasts for the high school. "I know the guy, and he was always very professional, jovial," Waronek added.
For police, however, the arrest of a teacher like McGuiness in the sting operation was no big surprise. "Most of these people who desire to have sex with underage youngsters try to put themselves in proximity to children," said Sgt. Phil Keenan, a supervising investigator for Redondo. "That's where you find this type of behavior."
The arrest of McGuiness, 32, on charges of attempted lewd conduct with a juvenile, was only the latest in a series of Internet stings in which police, posing as youngsters on the computer network, enter into real-time conversations with adults who respond to information on the web that make it appear they are talking to young girls or boys, not police.
According to Keenan, Redondo and Torrance police, operating out of a computer lab in Torrance jointly funded by Torrance and Redondo police departments, have conducted more than 30 Internet stings in the last six months or so. While some of those stings have involved credit card thefts and the like, many of them have been focussed on adults seeking sex with youngsters.
Eskridge said the problem of adults seeking sex victims over the web is real. "We had two live victims that had consensual sex with men in their late 20s and 30s who had contacted them over the Internet," he said. "The problem is real and those are local kids reported to us."
Eskridge said McGuiness responded rapidly to the Internet profile of a 13-year-old that police had put up on the web. Often adults will attempt to 'groom' youngsters with explicit porno shots or other sexual materials before attempting to meet youngsters for the real thing, Eskridge said. But Eskridge said McGuiness went right to the topic of sex in his web conversations.
"He pushed real hard," Eskridge said. "He didn't do much grooming at all. He pushed hard for a meeting right away."
Eskridge said after his arrest McGuiness expressed shock then the usual resignation. Eskridge said McGuiness gave police permission to retrieve his computer at home in order to examine it for child-sex materials. Had he not given permission, the computer would have been seized with a search warrant, said Eskridge.
After the arrest, McGuiness was released on $50,000 bail and his arraignment in court was set for Feb. 14, Eskridge said.
According to Keenan, McGuiness had been teaching and coaching at the Catholic high school in Torrance for about 10 years.
School officials from Bishop Montgomery could not be reached for comment and did not return repeated voice mail requests for comment.
Neither could McGuiness be reached for comment.
According to a report in the Daily Breeze, McGuiness was relieved of his teaching and coaching duties pending a resolution f the charges filed against him.
According to Eskridge, the strike on the phony web posting was not unusual. "This guy did a member profile search, looking for people online in Redondo Beach and found me." He added, "There's plenty of child pornography out there. The FBI does these stings, the LAPD, everybody stays pretty busy."
Keenan said that of the previous Internet stings, many had resulted in jail tems of six months to a year, plus fines. He said all the convictions he knew about had been plea bargainings.
Keenan said most police agencies are still behind the game in tackling Internet crime. He said Internet crime is rampant and growing, particularly credit card theft and misuse of credit card numbers. Another common form of Internet crime is "cyberstalking" where a person's website is bombarded with threats, angry messages and the like from jilted lovers or other enemies. One woman was constantly getting lewd and suggestive E-mail, Keenan said. It turned out she played the piano in a local bar and had attracted a cyberstalker, he said.
Keenan said a big part of Internet crime is using the forensic computer technology set up by Redondo and Torrance to examine computers of those caught in stings. This, he added, is no easy task. Hard drives must be "mirrored" to avoid disrupting the original evidence and often attempts by alleged criminals to erase or encrypt information on the hard drive make retrieval difficult. It's a technology police are only now learning, Keenan added. He said Redondo now assigns one detective full-time to computer crime, with a second working about half time to catch computer criminals. "These people involved in crimes over computers. They know that all kinds of people are out there looking for them now," Keenan said.
Eskridge emphasized that the Internet stings were set up to attract certain types of criminals, not specific individuals. "I didn't target anybody," he said with reference to McGuiness. "He found me."
Asked if he could paint a picture of a child-sex seeker's motivational structure, Eskridge said he was no psychologist. "You in your mind have an idea what sex is, what enjoyable sex is," he said. "Every adult has an idea what enjoyable sex is. Maybe I want a woman six years younger than me. Some like blondes, some brunettes. Some like kids."
Eskridge said police are being taught that 70 percent of the sex drive is in the brain, while 15 percent is in the sex organ and another 15 percent in other bodily organs. "Everybody likes different things. For some people out there having sex with a certain age group girl or boy is enjoyable sex," Eskridge said adding that he had no personal axe to grind in seeking out child sex offenders.
Bishop Montgomery alumnus Mark Waronek said the school had done the right thing in temporarily suspending McGuiness. Waronek said he'd talked to several other people who knew McGuiness and that all of them had been shocked at the arrest. "Everybody is saying the same thing," Waronek said. "He was a nice guy, they can't believe something like that would happen to him."
Eskridge wasn't surprised.
"It certainly saddens you when anybody in a position of trust and authority is caught up in one of these," he said, "but I've been doing this 20 years. Nothing really surprises me."ER