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Task force targets child predators
by Jerry Roberts
Because a woman took the time to offer her career expertise gratis in her hometown, it became easier to arrest a 21-year-old man in Santa Barbara County for allegedly sending harmful sexual matters to a 13-year-old in Manhattan Beach from a location in Palos Verdes Estates.
Joyce Karlin Fahey believes that with cooperation, information sharing and quick response time, geography shouldn’t be a barrier to police departments working together to protect children from sexual predators. Because Manhattan Beach Police Chief Ernie Klevasahl listened to city Councilwoman Fahey’s idea for a local Child Protection Task Force, and took it to a meeting of the South Bay Chiefs of Police six months ago, he secured the cooperation of police departments in Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Inglewood, Gardena, Torrance and Palos Verdes Estates as well as the Los Angeles County Sheriff and district attorney.
The investigation of Conrad Christopher Torres, who was arrested in Santa Ynez in Santa Barbara County in October, involved the collaboration of police forces in Manhattan, Redondo and Palos Verdes Estates, where the crime occurred.
The suspect met the girl in an Internet chat room, where both agreed to exchange photos, police said. His was sexual in nature, police said. The girl’s parents saw the photo and called Manhattan Beach police. The investigation was turned over to Palos Verdes Estates police after it was found that the alleged crime occurred in that department’s jurisdiction. The suspect was returned to PVE and charged with sending harmful matter with the intent of seducing a minor.
"The successful outcome of this investigation can be directly attributable to the resources provided by each of the participating departments," said Manhattan Beach Detective Sgt. Tony DiGenova. "It’s very important to do information sharing, to give police a better tool and be proactive about it. Pooling our resources can only help in finding predators."
Police can exchange descriptions, photos and other information quickly and easily, and hopefully prevent crimes in nearby towns. "At the point of the report, a flyer can be sent to neighboring cities," Fahey said. South Bay cities in the task force were alerted last week when several Manhattan Beach girls reported to police that a man was exposing himself to them.
Two 12-year-old girls were playing after school just off Manzanita Lane in Manhattan Beach when a man driving a blue, older-model, American-made sedan stopped the car near them. He opened the door and revealed that he was nude except for a cloth over his genitals. The children ran away and reported the near-flasher to police.
The officers searched the area for the car with negative results. Five days later, a white male stepped from a blue car parked on Redondo Avenue and exposed himself to another 12-year-old girl. After he returned to the car, she realized that he was following her in it, so she ran, and he drove away in the opposite direction.
After the first incident, Manhattan Beach detectives alerted other law-enforcement agencies of the incident with a description of the subject and made special notification to the agencies involved in the Child Protection Task Force. The afternoon after the second incident, detectives conducted surveillance on the two streets where the man was seen and surrounding areas in the eastern portion of the city near Manhattan Beach Intermediate School.
A detective spotted a blue vehicle driving slowly along side a 13-year-old girl walking on a sidewalk. The detective noticed that the driver wasn’t wearing a shirt. The girl saw the police and yelled at them to "get" the subject. She later told them that the man had gotten out of the car before the detectives’ arrival and walked toward her wearing only a T-shirt and underwear while he clutched his testicles. The police immediately took the man, identified as Timothy Wayne Hurd of Long Beach, into custody and charged him with four counts of child annoying.
"That was a first-rate example of police work," said Fahey, who based the task force on her previous creation of the Southern California Child Exploitation Task Force in 1978 when she was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office. An amalgamation of the FBI, U.S. Postal Service, military, Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, the L.A. County Sheriff and other agencies, that task force has been responsible for the arrests or prosecutions of more than 200 persons on charges of child sexual abuse, pornography, exploitation and other crimes. Fahey chaired that task force, which became a model for similar task forces in other states and nations, until she became a Children’s Court judge in 1991.
"I started noticing attempts on children in Manhattan Beach that I saw in the newspapers," she said. "I would see articles on attempts, but none about arrests or prosecutions. These people’s crimes don’t stop at borders. I wanted to combine resources and identify perpetrators. I wanted to see something done in my back yard. It’s the kind of thing that police might think makes more work, but the beauty of it is that when it works successfully, it saves work for everyone involved. If a predator is unsuccessful in getting a kid into a car at, say, Meadows and Manhattan Beach Boulevard, he’s not ready to stop and he won’t care about which jurisdiction he’s in."
One problem in front of the task force is its location. Manhattan Beach has been the locus of its creation and meetings. But police in the city don’t have the computer space to build the database needed to start special cataloguing of sexual-crime attempts, locations, cross-references, convictions and further data on known offenders. While the city has launched plans for a new and upgraded police station, it is years away from realizing those plans.
"Critical to information dissemination is a computer database," DiGenova said. "Putting together a budget and getting the manpower together to get a system up and running are things that we’re certainly going to have to look into."
The task force would also check more often on past offenders who, by law, have to register as such with their cities once a year. "We’ll be letting them know that we’re in the area, and we’ll look at their [methods of operation]," DiGenova said.