Founded in 2008, ABSOLUTE ZERO UNITES is a blog covering corrupt politicians and vigilantes who abuse sex offense registries to commit crimes (murder, assault, harassment, vandalism). This is a journalism blog; all articles posted in this blog is covered by Fair Use under 17 USC 107. All opinions are my own, and all persons featured here are (IMHO, of course) criminals and assorted losers.
In order: David Joseph Zimmerman, Kasey Lane O'Donnell and Syrus Deville Durant
Arrest your local vigilante scumbags, especially the grinning piece of trash on the left with the punchable face. I'd like to see Washington state make examples out of these lowlifes.
Shasta DA condemns local vigilante actions following arrests
by Maxwell Tedford, KRCR StaffFri, October 4th 2024 at 4:43 PM
REDDING, Calif. — The Shasta County District Attorney's Office filed charges against members of a local vigilante group after their arrests following a "To Catch a Predator"-style operation.
Three members of the vigilante group calling itself Redding Dads Against Predators (DAP) have been arrested because of what they allegedly did during one of their catches of alleged pedophiles.
The group formed in August as essentially a local grassroots version of 'To Catch a Predator'. Their escalating tactics have caught the eyes of many online, and thousands of followers. However, now police say it has led to both their arrests along with the arrest of the alleged predator they were trying to catch.
The DAP members arrested were David Joseph Zimmerman, Kasey Lane O'Donnell and Syrus Deville Durant. All three are facing multiple charges, including felony assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a crime, battery and vandalism.
The Shasta County District Attorney's Office issued a statement regarding the vigilante group, announcing that charges have been filed against three of its members; condemning their actions:
"The Shasta County District Attorney’s Office filed charges against three members of a local Dads Against Predators (DAP) group, Kasey O’Donnell, Syrus Durant and David Zimmerman. The charges filed include conspiracy, false imprisonment by violence, battery, and vandalism.
These charges stem from an incident where three members of a local DAP group met with a person at Caldwell Park after O’Donnell communicated with the person. The person the three defendants met with is a person who has a mental disability. The defendants chose to prevent the person from leaving the location by taking his bicycle, yelling at him, damaging his bike, and physically assaulting him, resulting in him going to the hospital.
Vigilante justice has no place in our community. The actions taken by this particular DAP group to find “predators” is being done in a way which violates investigative techniques used by trained law enforcement and trained civilians to properly investigate and preserve evidence for successful prosecution. The actions of this particular DAP group are allowing individuals who they believe have a sexual interest in minors, to get away with an actual slap on the face rather than being prosecuted. The humiliation tactics used by this particular DAP group will not serve as a long-term deterrent, and it interferes with the proper investigation and successful prosecution of potential offenders.
DO NOT take action into your own hands. The District Attorney’s Office asks that the community provide tips and leads on potential crimes, including all information the community may have regarding child physical and sexual abuse or human trafficking, to Law Enforcement." ...
The police report states in the following days DAP members claimed *** was the aggressor. However, a video police say they obtained from O'Donnell's phone showed that *** tried to leave the scene multiple times, and not make a violent move until he was pushed and hit repeatedly by the DAP team. The video goes on to show that as *** began to fight back he was tackled from the back and hit in the head repeatedly with punches and kicks. Going on for several minutes until nearby security guards broke up the altercation.
The latest attempt to exploit vulnerable people. I should clarify why these entrapment operations are bad. Many people caught in these operations are approached by these folks on legitimate adult dating sites. Most often, they claim to be over age 18. They often form online relationships with their victims, then perform a bait-and-switch by then claiming they're really under age 18 later on, most often just as the victim has already made arrangements to meet. In some cases, the bait-and-switch did not even occur on time. The victim is then harassed, assaulted, and/or extorted. Many of these entrapment busts are posted online. Few, if any, of the vigilante-run operations lead to arrests. Some vigilantes have even been arrested, and rightfully so.
Scottsdale police warning of dangerous teen trend, luring child p***ators
By Sarah Robinson
Published: Aug. 2, 2024 at 8:02 PM CDT
A new social media trend is causing concern among Valley police officers.
In the past few weeks, there have been multiple cases of teens attempting to lure potential child predators and then posting their encounters online.
The trend is reminiscent of a 2000s TV show, To Catch a P***ator.
But police say these operations should only ever be done by trained professionals, not teen vigilantes.
Scottsdale police officers want parents to talk to their kids about this social media trend and help stop it.
Experts say luring a potential child predator is extremely dangerous and can turn violent in an instant.
Scottsdale Police Sgt. Allison Sempsis says it can also end in charges against the teens.
“No. 1, someone can get seriously hurt, even killed in these types of situations,” Sempsis said. “Please do not do this. Stop if you’re doing it. And check and see if your children are doing it.”
She says many things can go wrong in these encounters, and the teens involved could get into trouble.
“We don’t want anyone to get arrested if they were to do something like criminal damage or assault, where there is not probable cause to arrest the actual alleged child predator but to arrest the people luring this person in,” Sempsis said.
Sempsis says there have been two cases in Scottsdale in the past few weeks.
“As the alleged suspect pulled into the parking lot he saw that he was surrounded by cars full of teenagers,” Sempsis said. “Once he backed out, one of the teenagers threw a rock through his back window, breaking it and then he took off.”
In a second case, after teens confronted a would-be predator in person, they demanded money or said they would report him to the police.
“That is extortion and it is a felony offense in Arizona,” said Russ Richelsoph, a criminal defense attorney.
Even if teens did successfully expose a would-be predator, Richelsoph says attorneys would have a tough time prosecuting that person.
“When police conduct these sting operations, they have to be very careful to not engage in something called entrapment. Entrapment is a situation where the police plant an idea into the mind of an otherwise innocent person and kind of convince them to commit the crime,” Richelsoph said.
Both cases in Scottsdale are under investigation; so far, no arrests have been made.
Still, Sgt. Sempsis says it’s a good idea to explain to your teen why this social media trend is a bad idea.
This rogue police department set people up using a private vigilante group and sent people to facilities where they intended for those they entrapped to be assaulted, possibly murdered. These MAGAts should be rounded up and hauled off to prison themselves.
Heading this clown show is Shawn Taylor, aka the "Conspiracy Cop", who apparently has been bouncing around from jon to job.
'Disturbing' recordings from inside child-predator sting shows police, MAGA operatives ignoring laws
Recordings show police discussing luring predator suspect to a jurisdiction where he may not leave the jail alive
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — What happens when you give people with bizarre conspiracy theories a gun and a badge?
Secret recordings from inside the troubled Millersville Police Department provide a sobering answer to that question.
Those recordings — obtained from what was supposed to be a sting operation to nab sexual predators who prey on innocent children — show that, in their zeal to make some big cases, Millersville's conspiracy-minded cops may have crossed the line of what's legal.
That sting was run back in May by Millersville Assistant Police Chief Shawn Taylor and a colorful cast of characters he assembled for the operation.
Among the revelations, the recordings show:
Taylor did not involve other law enforcement agencies with more experience in such operations because of his unfounded conspiracy theories that prominent state officials are involved in child sex trafficking.
Members of a private group posed online as minors — despite Millersville police being told by prosecutors that the sting would be legal only if sworn law enforcement officers were the ones doing the work.
Shawn Taylor told one operative that investigators would be using "pre-signed search warrants," which would likely be illegal, according to experts.
Police arrested one suspect then, when he refused to talk to investigators, they turned him over to the private group for questioning.
A Millersville detective boasted that the suspect was being taken to a jail where it was likely that he might not come out alive.
"This is the most disturbing video that I've ever been asked to comment on since I've been asked to do the legal analyst job here at the station," said Nick Leonardo, a veteran Nashville lawyer who worked with NewsChannel 5 for some 15 years.
Millersville police did not respond to NewsChannel 5's request for comment.
As NewsChannel 5 Investigates first revealed, Shawn Taylor has voiced support for all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories, many of them involving child sex trafficking and some of the country's most powerful political figures.
Taylor even believes the discredited QAnon "Pizzagate" hoax that falsely claimed Democrats kept child sex slaves locked up in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
He imagines that Millersville, a community of about 6,000 people just north of Nashville, is at the center of Tennessee's drug and human trafficking operations.
The recordings show that, in a phone call in the run-up to the Millersville sting, Taylor once again revealed his conspiracy-fueled paranoia, insisting that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and other state law enforcement agencies are involved in the sex trafficking.
"So be real careful, especially when it comes to our state agencies," Taylor cautioned. "So we've just got to be real careful with them because we have people what we've already identified that are involved in the money laundering side."
"It's unhinged. It is very, very, very dangerous."
In fact, a team photo for Operation Clean Sweep, as Taylor dubbed it, consisted of just five police officers from Millersville — none with actual experience running child sex stings.
Two of the men were introduced to the group as "prayer warriors," who are part of a group that believes the battle against human trafficking is a battle against "demons."
The woman in the middle was a three-time Republican candidate for Congress from North Carolina, who faced accusations of domestic violence and child abuse that she denied.
There were also two MAGA podcasters and former Navy SEAL Craig "Sawman" Sawyer.
Back in 2018, Sawyer took a Tucson TV crew to a camp that he suggested might have been used for child sex trafficking.
In fact, police said it was just a camp used by homeless families.
These days, on far-right podcasts, Sawyer raises money for his own Arizona-based nonprofit called Veterans for Child Rescue, but there's no evidence that his group has ever rescued any actual children.
On one recent podcast, Sawyer claimed, without evidence, that he knew of a location "near Nashville, Tennessee that they are flying the children into."
Even more bizarrely, the secret recordings reveal Sawyer talking about his hopes for continuing to work with Shawn Taylor.
"And start whacking some — you know, not to make it political — but whole leftist, corrupt, pedophile, this evil thing that's taken over Nashville," Sawyer said.
Nick Leonardo's reaction?
"Just when you thought it couldn't get any more shocking, you keep listening and it just gets worse as it goes."
For example, in one recording, Shawn Taylor talks about being prepared for the operation with "pre-signed search warrants."
"We're going to have search warrants that are already — they'll have to meet certain perimeters for us to execute the search warrant — but they are going to be pre-signed search warrants," Taylor told a member of Sawyer's team.
There's just one major problem.
"A search warrant cannot be pre-signed," Leonardo said. "You have to see what's going on, and you have to put that into a warrant, and you have to swear to that individually in front of a judge — and that becomes the probable cause."
NewsChannel 5 asked, "Is a pre-signed search warrant going to stand up in court?"
"A pre-signed search warrant would be a criminal offense in and of itself," Leonardo answered.
A source with longtime experience running child predator schemes confirmed that "pre-signed search warrants" would not be legal.
In the recordings, a member of Sawyer's team reveals a deal with Shawn Taylor where Millersville PD would seize data from any suspects and share that data with Sawyer's group — people who are not law enforcement officers.
"They are going to dump their phones, and they've agreed to give us their contact lists off their phones — so all of this data" would be shared with the group, said Forrest Sealey, executive director of Veterans for Child Rescue.
Again, Leonardo was shocked by what he heard.
"There's no reason whatsoever that any kind of evidence — electronic data seized from any kind of device pursuant to a valid search warrant — should ever be in the hands of a private individual. That potentially would lend itself to a criminal charge."
"So that could be a crime, as well?"
"Potentially, it could be a crime."
And the video shows it was members of Craig Sawyer's team actually doing the chatting, posing online as a 12-year-old girl.
But that's not how Shawn Taylor was told that it had to be done to make it legal.
"So we just talked to our DA," Taylor said in a telephone call before the operation. "And, so, with the Tennessee state law, it said that the officer has to do the actual typing, that with our law it says it has to be a law enforcement officer posing as a minor."
Leonardo agreed.
"Clearly it needs to be a POST-certified sworn law enforcement officer on the other side of that computer tapping those keys."
But video from inside the operation shows that not only were members of Sawyer's team doing the typing, they were also concerned about there not being video of them doing it.
"They needed videos of them, law enforcement chatting," one of the so-called "chatters" told a videographer.
"I'm not getting your faces," the man replied.
"Yeah. I just... I'm cool with it," she responded, "but they wanted to show law enforcement — not us — touching the phones."
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Leonardo, "And the fact that they end up with people who are not law enforcement officers tapping the keys, those cases are in trouble?"
"Those cases are in serious, serious trouble," he agreed.
The recordings also show the plan was to try to lure the predators to a Shell station in Robertson County because the officers felt the prosecutor in this district would be more likely to work with them on their cases.
Millersville detective Mike Candler referred to fellow detective Todd Dorris as "Mater," a character from the animated "Cars" film series.
"Mater there is best friends with the district attorney in Robertson County," Candler said. "They went to high school together. So he said, 'Well, let's put this here so I can talk to him.' And we lock everything in. So he won't stand for nothing, and they all hate pedophiles."
And when they did get one suspect who had bicycled up Interstate 65 from Nashville thinking he was going to have sex with a 12-year-old girl, Millersville police took the man into custody.
"They said he was peddling like a son of a bitch," Candler recounted to the chatters.
Then, according to the recordings, the suspect was brought to a Millersville fire hall.
He didn't want to talk to the police, so they turned him over to Craig Sawyer's film crew.
"I just walked out, and y'all's little camera crew went in and starting asking questions — and he just gave everything up," Candler said.
One of the chatters sounded perplexed.
"The camera crew went in?"
"Yeah."
"Is that...?"
Candler quickly answered, "It's fine. We didn't prompt them, we didn't prompt them to ask any questions. We didn't have them do anything. It was unsolicited, and he just started what we call spontaneous utterance — just laying it out there."
Leonardo had a different opinion.
"Hands-down, the confession is not coming in for a host of different reasons because you have a private third party doing the interrogation and sitting here and filming it. That's not coming into evidence. It's just not."
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked, "So again this guy could walk, probably would walk?"
"Yeah, he certainly would walk, certainly would walk based on the facts that we are going over here," Leonardo said. "I don't see how this prosecution could stick."
Still, the suspect was booked into Robertson County Jail — which, the detective grimly hinted, could be his last stop.
"Honestly, I wouldn't doubt he gets, comes up missing in the jail," Candler said.
"Yeah, I agree. I would like that," one of the chatters answered.
The detective continued, "That's a Robertson County thing. Robertson, Maury, Hickman, Monroe and Giles — you're not coming out of the jail."
Leonardo was stunned.
"What does that mean? What does he know that the rest of us do not?"
We noted, "Essentially, it sounds like he is saying we are taking him to a jurisdiction where we don't think he'll come out alive."
"Well, yeah, that could be the inference that's drawn," Leonardo said.
"That's very scary, and I think that's cause for an investigation by the TBI to determine what was meant by that."
The NewsChannel 5 legal analyst said he believes Millersville PD is now a rogue agency where conspiracy theorists have decided the laws don't apply to themselves.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Leonardo, "From what you've heard in these recordings, is this a police department that's out of control?"
"It sounds to me like it's a police department that never had control," he answered.
"This is jeopardizing the safety of the citizens of Millersville and something needs to be done."
Craig Sawyer has gone on InfoWars and other far-right podcasts attacking NewsChannel 5 for our investigation of Taylor and referring to this reporter as a "pedophile protector."
He has claimed this predator sting generated enough evidence to charge another 70 people, although there's no way to tell if that's true.
Robertson County prosecutors have not returned NewsChannel 5's phone calls.
In cases where the suspects did not travel to meet the 12-year-old girl, one potential obstacle could be, according to the recordings, the "chatter house" was located in Sumner County — which is an entirely different judicial district.
It's not clear whether prosecutors there would take up any potential cases.
Alex Rosen, aka "Chet Goldstein" the dumbfuck who threatened to "send hookers" to my house (something I wish he did), is still pretending to be a teenage girl online. I can understand why because his mental capacity is stuck at that age, probably from his days getting hit in the head playing high school football. Whether it is onset CTE or just low IQ, Rosen can't get away from his controversial hobby and get a REAL job.
YouTube banned Rosen for alleged racism and other bullying tactics I previously mentioned on this blog:
"...a lot of controversies came out about Alex. Alex was called out for one of his older prank videos, where he called Black Lives Matter hotlines, and repeatedly said racial slurs against African-Americans. He was also on video, saying racial slurs again, homophobia, being creepy to a decoy asking to do inappropriate things for him claiming it was a predator, and talked about having a three year old female child in his basement. He also made racist jokes about African-Americans, such as a joke on video about them "not being able to swim." Chet's behavior was called out by SomeOrdinaryGamers, and penguinz0, for his older videos. Since then, both EDP445 and Alex have been terminated off of YouTube."
A predator hunting YouTuber and a man seemingly caught in a sting both had their channels removed by the platform
Steven Asarch
All of the channels associated with EDP445 and Chet Goldstein have been removed from YouTube.
The Chet channel posted a video alleging that EDP445 had sexual conversations with a minor.
Alex Rosen, who ran Chet Goldstein, has a history of controversial content.
YouTube has taken down the channels belonging to Bryan Moreland, known online as EDP445, and Alex Rosen, who ran the Chet Goldstein channel.
The actions, which occurred at the same time, came after Rosen claimed in a video that Moreland had sent sexual messages and images to a decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl.
On Monday, the Chet Goldstein channel posted an hour-long "sting" video where Rosen and fellow predator hunter Ghost, who runs the channel CC Unit, approached Moreland in Bakersfield, California. Rosen's video at least made it seem like Moreland thought he was going to meet up with a 13-year-old girl. That video went viral, pulling in over two million views.
Moreland, who had built up an audience making videos and ranting about the Philadelphia Eagles, has disappeared from social media since the videos went viral.
The Bakersfield Sheriff's Department told a local ABC affiliate news station on April 22 that the "video's content is under investigation but as of now no arrests have been made." The department did not return a request for comment by publication time.
Rosen posted an Instagram video about the channel ban, pointing his followers to his side-channel Stanley Yelnatz. Rosen told Insider that he received an email from YouTube, but did not receive a strike, YouTube's term for a warning. Rosen says his stings and content moving forward will be posted to the Predator Poachers website.
"We can't post anything on YouTube anymore pretty much, that platform just doesn't like us," Rosen says in the Instagram video.
YouTube did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
It's not entirely clear what the basis of the bans was
It's still not clear why each creator was banned.
Moreland, the purported subject of the sting, has been accused of messaging multiple minors in the past, and YouTube has taken action against creators who have faced major scandals in the past few months.
Rosen has a history of posting unsavory content along with his stings.
He created the Predator Poachers YouTube channel in 2019 after watching similar YouTubers and experimenting with setting up his own stings. In 2020, it was taken down due to multiple community guideline strikes, though what those strikes were for remains unclear. On that channel, he would often target gay men who were seeking contact with male minors. In one video from the deleted channel, a minor in a sting starts to unbuckle and take off his pants around a suspect before Rosen walks in. The decoy is the cousin of Rosen, who was 16 at the time of recording.
"I agree it was very irresponsible," Rosen told Insider. "We were 19 and just starting out and we didn't think anything of having a cousin of ours who's a couple of years younger there."
In another video, a purported minor who was used as bait for a sting said the male target was "touching and kissing me and trying to hold my hand." Rosen said in later clips that he uses minors as bait for his videos.
Aside from using minors in the videos, Rosen created several ethically dubious situations. In one video, where he confronts a Nebraska man who Rosen said sent sexual messages to a decoy posing as an 8-year-old, Rosen says that if the man doesn't put on an "I Lick A--" T-shirt he will call the police. That man was charged with one count of Attempted First Degree Sexual Assault of a Child and ten counts of Possession of Child Pornography according to News Channel Nebraska.
"We absolutely toy with them, we make sure we get their confession on camera, that is the most important part," Rosen told Insider before the ban.
Additionally, Rosen posted multiple videos and livestreams where he uses the N-word. In an interview done before the ban of his channel, Rosen said that "it obviously looks bad" and that he has "no hatred in my heart towards any group of people." In one video, Rosen prank called a BLM hotline, used multiple homophobic and racist slurs, and joked about pedophelia.
YouTube host leads police to arrest suspected sex offender in EG
By Cameron Macdonald - Citizen News Editor Aug 18, 2021 Updated Aug 18, 2021
The Elk Grove police on Aug. 11 arrested a 20-year-old man who allegedly visited Morse Community Park to have a sexual encounter with a minor in a restroom.
“Ghost,” who is a YouTube channel host and the anonymous leader of an self-described movement called, Creep Catching (CC) Unit, announced that their decoy operation led authorities to arrest Timothy Brock of Elk Grove.
CC Unit targets sexual predators online and then releases their video-recorded confrontations with them on YouTube. They also submit evidence to law enforcement in order to have the suspects arrested. The CC Unit in June reportedly led authorities to arrest a suspected sex offender in Roseville.
“The mission is to expose adults who prey on children,” Ghost told the Citizen about the CC Unit’s work. “Get these adults arrested and convicted for their crimes. Change laws to where predators get harsher punishments for their crimes against children.”
During the Elk Grove incident, the CC Unit confronted Brock at Morse Park before the police arrived. Ghost said that he then gave officers the text messages and online chats between the suspect and the decoy who posed as a 13-year-old boy.
“He was on our radar for four months,” he told the Citizen about the suspect.
Brock was arrested on felony charges of communicating with a minor to commit sex offenses, meeting with a minor for purposes of lewd behavior, and attempting to possess obscene matter of a minor in a sexual act. He is currently being held in the Sacramento County Main Jail on a $100,000 bail, according to jail records. Brock is also reportedly scheduled for a settlement conference at the Sacramento Superior Court on Aug. 25.
Elk Grove police spokesperson Hannah Gray confirmed that officers responded to the call at Morse Park and they took the suspect into custody.
“However, we highly discourage this type of activity, due to the propensity for danger,” she said about private groups targeting suspected criminals.
Gray added that her agency advises people to instead contact law enforcement to report any possible or known crimes. She mentioned the work of the Sacramento Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which targets sexual predators online.
I can't find one of agent Daniel Alfin, but here's a pic of Agent Laura Schwartzenberger
Over the years, the FBI and local law enforcement have engaged in entrapment operations, and in the case of the FBI, they were using actual CP to try to entice people into their entrapment operations. Then these agencies conduct massive "sweeps" where they not only bust these folks, they also conduct registry compliance sweeps and prostitution sweeps and bundle them all together in these dubious "human trafficking busts." Anything to inflate the numbers.
You don't see them do this with drug traffickers and gangs like MS-13 because they'll actually fight back. Most people accused of sex crimes aren't violent criminals and these agencies know this, so it is good PR for them. It is low hanging fruit that makes people think they're doing something special when they are not.
Maybe this incident will make the FBI and other agencies scale back these ridiculous operations. I wonder how many entrapment operations these two agents conducted. BTW, I noticed the news media doesn't want to bring up the fact the FBI ran a Dark Web CP site themselves (using actual CP) to engage in their honeypot operations.
Three other agents were injured in a shooting that occurred as agents were executing a search warrant in Sunrise, west of Fort Lauderdale. The man being investigated was found dead.
By Patricia Mazzei, Adam Goldman, Johnny Diaz and Christina Morales
Feb. 2, 2021
MIAMI — The sun had not come up yet on Tuesday when a group of F.B.I. agents assigned to investigate criminals who prey on children online approached the Water Terrace apartments in Sunrise, Fla., to execute a search warrant, a routine part of the job that is always fraught with risk.
What exactly happened in the ensuing minutes is unknown, but a gun battle broke out, rousting neighbors out of bed in the quiet residential community. Law enforcement officials called emergency dispatchers. Multiple shots fired, they reported. Send air rescue.
Two F.B.I. agents died and three more were injured in one of the deadliest shootings in the bureau’s history. No agent had been shot and killed on duty since 2008. A similarly bloody shootout took place in a Miami suburb 35 years ago, killing two F.B.I. agents and injuring five others.
The man being investigated in the case, which the authorities said involved violent crimes against children, had barricaded himself inside the complex and was found dead. A law enforcement official said it appeared that the man had killed himself before agents were able to arrest him. His identity was not released until his family could be notified of his death.
Video footage from local police stations showed a grisly scene at the open-air apartment complex. A SWAT truck had rammed into staircase railings that lay on the ground in tatters. There were blood stains on the floor outside the apartments. The police swarmed to the complex, shutting down the roads and keeping people out for most of the day.
Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, identified the two agents who were killed as Special Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger.
“Every day, F.B.I. special agents put themselves in harm’s way to keep the American people safe,” Mr. Wray said in a statement. “Special Agent Alfin and Special Agent Schwartzenberger exemplified heroism today in defense of their country. The F.B.I. will always honor their ultimate sacrifice and will be forever grateful for their bravery.”
Ms. Schwartzenberger, 43, was a mother of two from Colorado and had been with the F.B.I. since 2005. She was part of the violent crimes against children squad in the bureau’s Miami field office, court records show. She was assigned to the Innocent Images National Initiative, a part of the F.B.I.’s cybercrimes program established to combat the proliferation of images of child sexual abuse online.
Mr. Alfin, 36, was a father of one from New York and had been a special agent since 2009. He was assigned to the Miami Child Exploitation task force. He discussed his role in an online F.B.I. article about the 2015 arrest of a Naples, Fla., man who ran what the bureau described as the world’s largest child pornography website. The site, called Playpen, had more than 150,000 users around the world.
“They put their lives on the line and that’s a hell of a price to pay,” President Biden said of the agents in remarks from the Oval Office. “My heart aches for the families.”
Dawn Garrick, a resident of the apartment complex where the shootings occurred, said she was awakened from her sleep shortly after 6 a.m. by blaring police sirens and cruiser lights gleaming into her ground-floor bedroom window. From her room, Ms. Garrick, 53, watched as concerned neighbors stepped out to see what was going on, only to be directed back inside by the police. About an hour later, she said, she saw paramedics loading someone on a stretcher into an ambulance.
The community is typically safe and quiet, she said.
“There are a lot of working professionals,” she said. “Everybody is friendly.”
Two of the wounded agents, each of them shot multiple times, according to the F.B.I., were transported to a hospital. The third did not require hospitalization.
The F.B.I. squads that investigate crimes against children are considered some of the most difficult assignments because of the disturbing and graphic nature of the cases they handle. Agents typically review horrendous depictions of children being sexually exploited, images that are then shared with others online.
Investigations into child sexual abuse often start with a tip from online social media companies like Facebook, which reported finding nearly 60 million images and videos in 2019 alone. About half of the content was not necessarily illegal, according to the company, and was reported to help law enforcement with investigations.
Yet companies can usually only detect a small percentage of what is distributed, since they rely on automated systems that can only flag material that has been previously flagged by users. From a tip of just one or two images or videos, investigators frequently find troves of thousands, or more, on a suspect’s hard drive.
The sharing of this imagery can also point to real-world abuse. It is not uncommon to find offenders who share child sexual abuse imagery who have also abused children in real life.
Mr. Alfin was involved in an investigation into a dark web forum beginning in 2014 where members would upload and trade graphic images of child sexual abuse. The investigation resulted in the arrest of at least 350 people in the United States and hundreds more around the world. It is credited with rescuing over 300 children, according to a news release from the F.B.I.
For the past decade, criminals have increasingly been using advanced technologies like the dark web — where users’ internet protocol addresses are obscured — to stay ahead of the police. In one case, an Ohio man helped run a dark website with nearly 30,000 members from 2012 to 2014. The site, now shuttered, required users to share images of abuse to maintain good standing, according to court documents.
The online forum had a private section that was only available to members who shared imagery of children they had abused themselves.
Several police investigations in recent years have broken up other enormous dark web forums, including one known as Child’s Play that was reported to have had over a million user accounts.
No details have emerged on the investigation in Florida that led to Tuesday’s shooting. Hours after the gunfire, there was still a heavy police presence around the apartment complex.
George L. Piro, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Miami field office, said agents “meticulously plan” and execute search warrants almost daily.
“The vast majority of these warrants occur without incident,” he said. “The operations this morning in Sunrise ended tragically, with the subject opening fire on the members of the search team.”
Throughout the day, the police maintained a perimeter about half a mile north, restricting access to the complex and surrounding areas. Officers cordoned off a large swath of Nob Hill Road and set up a staging site in a nearby rehabilitation hospital.
The agents killed on Tuesday were the first who had been fatally shot in the line of duty since November 2008, when Special Agent Samuel S. Hicks, 33, was killed while serving a search warrant, according to the F.B.I.
Mr. Hicks was part of a team of agents executing an arrest warrant at a house near Pittsburgh that was connected to a drug trafficking ring, the bureau said.
The shooting on Tuesday was one of the worst in the history of the F.B.I.
In 1986, two agents were killed in Miami and five others wounded during the pursuit of two violent bank robbers who were also killed in the exchange. The gun battle at the Suniland Shopping Plaza in what is now the village of Pinecrest was the costliest in F.B.I. history.
In November 1994, two agents were killed, a third agent was wounded and a 15-year-old boy was shot in the leg when a man came into the cold case squad room of Police Headquarters in Washington and opened fire with an assault rifle, according to the F.B.I.
A police detective was also killed during the shooting. The gunman, a suspect in a triple killing a month earlier, had left notes saying he planned to kill members of the local police homicide unit, the F.B.I. said.
On Tuesday, police officers stood in a somber line saluting as a gurney carrying one of the bodies draped in an American flag was placed into a fire rescue truck at the Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale. A procession of dark law enforcement S.U.V.s and motorcycles with sirens and lights then escorted the ambulance to the county medical examiner’s office.
He calls himself the Luzerne County Predator Catcher.
Using social media and dating applications, Musa Harris claims to have exposed 44 child molesters to date — people he says have shown up for sex after he identifies himself as an underage kid.
“You get a lot that say, ‘No, you’re too young for me.’ But you get them certain ones that like, they’re cool with the age. It don’t bother them. Those are the ones I put right on (Facebook) Live,” said Harris, 40. “It’s not just like weirdo-looking people. It’s people that you might not have ever thought would be like this. Those are the ones I really be wanting. The ones that’s not on Megan’s Law, stuff like that. People you trust right with your kids.”
Harris has been at it since early this year, but it wasn’t until a former police officer showed up for a meeting last weekend that his work went viral, with a video that hit more than 1 million views on TikTok. Text messages Harris posted along with the video indicate the man — whom The Citizens’ Voice is not identifying because he has not been charged — had been discussing having sex with a 15-year-old boy.
Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis has said her office is investigating that case, along with others. She declined to comment further Thursday.
Despite opposition from law enforcement — some have described Harris as a “vigilante” whose actions could hurt the chances for prosecuting child predators — he has strong support online. His Facebook group has more than 27,000 followers, and he said his TikTok account has almost 70,000.
Harris, of Wilkes-Barre, said he decided to get started as a predator catcher after hearing repeated stories about people being abused.
“I just was getting tired of hearing the stories about it,” Harris said, adding that he began watching videos of other predator catchers. “I seen people doing it, and I’m like man, I’m about to do it too. You can’t get arrested for doing it. I’m about to do it too.”
Harris, who is an unemployed father of four, said he spends hours on various social media and dating applications, many of which require users to be at least 18 years old. But he noted that kids often claim to be adults just so they can access the apps.
“I’m looking at it as, if my daughter can do this, how many other kids can do the same thing my daughter is doing and grown men are jumping out in their inboxes?” Harris said. “Something’s gotta give.”
During the conversations, he claims to be a minor, either a boy or girl around 14 or 15, he said.
“Once a child tells an adult that they’re 15, that should be the end of discussion right there,” Harris said.
Those who don’t end the conversation end up in front of a cellphone camera live-streaming the encounter to social media.
“My adrenaline just be pumping. Like, I’m ready to video them,” Harris said. “I’m like, ‘Do you know that person you was actually talking to was me and it wasn’t that little girl?’ I know I said I was 15 years old. You wouldn’t be on live right now if I didn’t say I was 15. You wouldn’t be getting exposed right now.”
While many of the comments on his posts support his mission, Harris said he has faced backlash as well.
Back in March, Wilkes-Barre Twp. police issued a Facebook statement referencing the videos, discouraging “vigilantes” from conducting such operations.
“For your own safety we recommend you do not make contact with these individuals,” police said. “You do not know what any of these individuals maybe capable of in person or retaliatory speaking, afterwards. It is best to contact law enforcement should you encounter adults seeking contact with minors. By not doing this you circumvent safeguards in place to track/monitor these individuals and potentially risk compromising means of prosecuting them.”
Harris said he has also faced personal attacks from individuals.
“I’ve done got so much crap from what I’m doing,” he said. “Harassment all over Facebook, people putting out lies on me.”
He acknowledged having a pending resisting arrest case from Kingston — he says it stemmed from his possession of prescribed medical marijuana — as well as several drug convictions in cases from 2009, but said they have nothing to do with what he is currently doing.
“That’s like 12 years ago,” Harris said.
Harris said he doesn’t plan to stop his work, and that he hopes the police will be able to make cases against the people he has highlighted.
“I hope that every person I got gets charged,” Harris said.
Despite Harris’ intentions, experts say prosecutors could have trouble with his cases. The statute defining unlawful contact with a minor — a law frequently cited in online child sex stings — says the offender needs to be “intentionally in contact with a minor, or a law enforcement officer acting in the performance of his duties who has assumed the identity of a minor.”
Legal experts say the law does not establish a crime in cases where a civilian is posing as a minor, even if working at the behest of police.
John Hakim, attorney administrator for the Luzerne County Department of Conflict Counsel, questioned whether the procedures and techniques being employed during an investigation conducted by an untrained civilian would hold up in court.
“People seem to think like, ‘Oh this guy’s a hero. They should be arresting these guys,’” Hakim said. “But I don’t know that any of that evidence is admissible because it’s not a law-enforcement officer. He’s not even acting under color of a law-enforcement officer, like a (confidential informant) would in a drug case.”
Sgt. Kenneth Bellis, commander for the Pennsylvania Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said police need extensive training regarding everything from what pictures they can use to what they are allowed to say while conducting sting operations.
“We actually have rules that we have to follow to try and prosecute the offenders,” he said.
As a result, the task force will not work with civilians conducting their own investigations.
“We strongly discourage any civilians who are not affiliated with law enforcement from engaging in vigilante activities,” Bellis said. “They may have good intentions, but it’s just too dangerous and harmful to the investigation.”
HUNTER HUNTED Paedophile hunter who starred in BBC documentary arrested by gun cops ‘over vigilante raid’
Officers swooped on Phill Hoban, 43, and other members of paedo hunters, Predator Exposure
EXCLUSIVE
By Paul Sims and Sun Staff
6th February 2019, 4:11 pmUpdated: 6th February 2019, 4:11 pm
A PAEDOPHILE hunter who appeared on a BBC documentary spoke of his fury yesterday after gun cops arrested him in a dawn raid.
Officers swooped on Phill Hoban, 43, and other members of Predator Exposure over claims of false imprisonment, assault and public order offences.
It is alleged they acted unlawfully when they detained two suspected paedos after separate online stings in August and January.
Armed police dragged members of the Leeds-based group from their homes before quizzing them for six hours on Monday.
Dad-of-five Phill, 43, who featured last month on BBC3 documentary ‘Paedophile Hunters: The Rise Of The Vigilantes’, slammed the arrests.
He said the move was designed to shut the group down - despite it being responsible for bringing more than 70 child sex offenders to justice.
Fuming Phill said: "I was immediately grabbed straight away and arrested and handcuffed behind my back in front of my family, they wouldn’t even let me put my bike away.
"There were armed police and police with tasers to arrest me on historic assault and false imprisonment allegations. It was heavy handed."
He said officers seized his mobile phone, his kids’ iPads, clothing, including his coat and trainers and took him to the cells at Wakefield Police Station.
The police are not interested in justice. Our arrests are a tactic to try and make us stop exposing paedophiles.
Phil Hoban
He and his team have since been released on bail.
Predator Exposure record and live stream all their vigilante stings, in which they confront a suspected paedophile engaging in online sex chat with a decoy.
The group make a citizens arrest and phone the police to arrest and take the suspects away.
Phill claims the two incidents he was questioned about and followed the same method all their 70 plus stings have done.
He added: "The police are not interested in justice. Our arrests are a tactic to try and make us stop exposing paedophiles.
"I was handcuffed behind my back by armed police. I would have attended a police station voluntarily and they know that.
"The have arrested us now because we are the biggest group in the country with the biggest following and they want to get the message out to other groups to stop.
"But the police are not doing enough to catch the paedophiles themselves.
"And yet they have enough resources to send eight police officers to five homes to arrest innocent members of the public."
COURT DATE
Phill and his colleagues have been bailed to Friday, when they may learn whether they will be charged.
A defiant a Phill said: "If they take us to court, they take us to court, but there will be uproar because we have many supporters and we have taken 70 odd paedophiles off the streets and protected hundreds of kids."
The police spokeswoman said: "The arrests were made in relation to alleged offences in the Wakefield area on August 11, 2018 and Leeds on January 13, 2019 in which members of the public were allegedly detained.
"Three men and two women were arrested. They have since all been released on bail. Enquiries are ongoing."
The paedophile hunting group have been responsible for bringing a number of offenders to justice through online stings in the past year.
This sorry son of a bitch is just the latest wannabe vigilante trying to get his 15 minutes.
So long as the police don't arrest these vigilante scumbags, they continue to work unimpeded. Sooner of later, their antics will get them hurt or worse, and I'll have a hard time caring when it happens.
This vigilante dad sets online traps to catch child predators
By Melkorka Licea August 4, 2018 | 9:25pm
A Queens dad has become a video vigilante, setting online traps for potential child predators and then blasting the real-life confrontations on Facebook for everyone to see.
Many have questioned Tony Blas’ methods and motivations, but few can argue with his results: So far he’s netted nine men in his virtual web, including an upstate teacher who was arrested Tuesday after the State Police viewed one of Blas’ gotcha clips.
Jonathan Castell, 44, a math teacher at Middletown HS, was charged with attempting to endanger the welfare of a child, police said. School officials suspended the 20-year educator “pending further investigation,” according to the school’s Web site.
Blas, a stocky, 36-year-old plumber, and his crew of eight stay-at-home moms began hunting for sexual predators two months ago. The team posts ads on dating sites claiming to be women in their late teens and twenties.
Once they get a response, Blas explains, they drop the bait: “Really, I’m only 13, 14 or 15 years old.
“If the men keep talking to us, then we know to keep after them,” he says.
In some cases, the female decoys send old photos of themselves to keep their targets on the hook. A meeting is eventually set up somewhere in the city.
However, the target is not greeted by a pretty teen, but a beefy, bearded Blas in a black bandana — with his smartphone camera rolling.
“You came all the way from Middletown to meet a 15-year-old girl? You think that’s right?” Blas barks at Castell in the Facebook video — viewed by 342,000 people so far — of the July 27 sting in Queens.
“I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I just wanted to hang out,” says the educator, perspiring profusely. “I just wanted to meet her. I wanted to see if she was for real.”
Blas continues to shame Castell, who’s wearing a Captain America T-shirt, while following him down the block.
“You’re sweating like a f–king guilty person on trial right now,” Blas says. “People like you make me f–king sick. You came out here to take the innocence of a f–king child.”
Castell had exchanged messages with one of Blas’ helpers, who went by “Brittany L.” on the Tagged app for a week before they agreed to meet at a McDonald’s in Glendale, Queens, according to a criminal complaint.
At one point during their Web chats, Castell told Brittany “he was dreaming about me and that it involved a can of whipped cream and a cherry on my tummy,” the decoy told investigators, according to the complaint. He also called her a “tease” and said he “thinks about me all day long.”
He sent the girl several photos of himself, including one in his bed and one in his bathroom with his shirt off, the complaint says.
When asked if he would bring a condom to their rendezvous, he allegedly replied, “Yes, I can.”
The 8-minute clip, posted the night of the sting, went viral, making it into the hands of Middletown HS principal Tracey Sorrentino almost immediately.
“It was brought to her attention by some parent groups,” said Trooper Steven Nevel, a State Police spokesman. Four days later, Castell, who made $97,000 last year, was cuffed at his home.
To Blas, the arrest is proof his controversial mission and vigilante methods are justified.
“I’m shining a much-needed light on these cockroaches,” he told The Post during one of his stings last week. “It’s about exposing them and letting people know who they are.”
Blas’ motivation comes from a deep, dark place: he was sexually abused by a close female family member for years as a child.
“If somebody can do that to their own family, anybody in the world is capable of doing that to a child,” said Blas, who has two daughters ages 5 and 11.
He also seems hungry for redemption. He admits he is a former heroin addict who robbed drug dealers and did time in prison before getting clean and turning his life around.
“Finally being able to do something positive means the world to me,” said Blas.
He was also inspired by a movement in the UK, spread through social media, where vigilante groups with names like Dark Justice, Guardians of the North, Silent Justice and Stinson Hunter have sprung up in the last few years, according to reports. Canada has followed with a group called Creep Catchers.
“I thought, ‘Why is no one doing this right here in my city?’ ” Blas said.
He began by posting an ad on a dating site claiming to be a 13-year-old girl. The response, he said, was “disgusting.”
“There were way too many grown men saying ‘Yes’ to meet a child,” he said.
Blas calls his group “Team Loyalty Makes you Family” — its Facebook page has attracted over 30,000 followers.
His team conducted its first “To Catch a Predator”-style sting in a video posted June 9 at the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn, where Blas confronted a bearded, balding man looking to meet a 15-year-old girl.
Most of the “decoys” are moms, some of whom will work 16 hours at a time hunting for pervs, Blas said.
As soon as I saw one of his videos I was hooked,” said one helper, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “I knew I needed to join. It feels so good to call these dudes out.”
This past Tuesday, she joined Blas on a sting in Queens to expose a 44-year-old Staten Island man. Posing as a 15-year-old, she and the man had been exchanging texts for five days.
“I want some sex … and a little neck to get me ready. If everything goes good, you can be my little shorty and I can pick you up some things from time to time … Like Jordans,” one of the man’s texts reads.
The 22-year-old helper, a social-justice major in college, didn’t mind putting herself at risk to help in the dragnet.
“I really want to catch this guy. He’s sick,” she said.
But Blas has plenty of critics.
Facebook shut down his page for several days last week because it “violated our community standards,” a spokeswoman said. He switched to YouTube, which also shut down his page.
Facebook reversed its decision on July 27. The site declined to explain its thinking.
One policing expert called Blas’ vigilante tactics dangerous.
“When someone gets cornered like a rat, that’s when they do stupid things to get away,” said retired NYPD Sgt. Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “They could come armed to the teeth knowing it could be a trap.”
The confrontations could also scare the men away from using online dating platforms — and from the undercover, online cops trying to catch them.
“This is not gonna end well if he keeps this up,” he said.
This douchebag is Anthony Green and his PJ Wannabe site is Truckers Against Pedophiles. He should be locked up for engaging in illegal sting activities. He should also be arrested for trying to incite a riot. Fuck this piece of shit.
A St. Louis Trucker Is on a Mission to Trap Pedophiles. He's Already Bagged 6
Posted By Danny Wicentowski on Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 8:53 am
It was past 2:30 a.m. Saturday, and from behind the camera of his smartphone, professional trucker and newbie pedophile hunter Anthony Green observes his target pull up in a white pickup truck. He follows the truck to a BP gas station parking lot in north St. Louis.
The trap has been laid, and now Green is ready to spring it shut.
"There he is," he says into the camera, which is streaming the footage to Facebook and thousands of viewers. "He's a sick-looking fuck."
A St. Louis native and founder of Truckers Against Predators, Green performed five prior stings between launching the group July 7 and that morning's livestream. It was third to take place in St. Louis. The sting locations have followed Green's trucking routes, resulting in recorded operations in Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and Missouri.
In St. Louis on Saturday, the target of the early-morning sting is a 46-year-old man, a local bartender "into BDSM," Green tells the viewers, adding that the man had brought along condoms — sheepskin — for a supposed tryst with a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl, of course, is actually a decoy working with Green. With the camera in selfie mode, Green describes to his audience how the man had texted about his desire to take the girl's virginity and have anal sex.
In the span of little more than a week, Green has confronted multiple targets in parking lots, berating and shaming them in front of a growing online audience. In one case, in Texas, the target left the scene in police handcuffs.
Each time, Green tells the men they are being filmed "for your safety and mine." In some cases, his videos show these men admitting what they'd done. Others deny and deflect, or cry, begging Green to give them another chance.
In the footage from Saturday, Green flips the camera view to the front-facing mode, which reveals the target of the sting: a clean-shaven, middle-aged man with a distinctively curled black mustache. (Since he has not been charged with a crime, RFT is not naming him.)
Green, camera rolling, greets the man by name. The man halts.
"You and me need to talk," Green tells him. "You know, the things you were worried about when you talking to the decoy..."
"Goddamit," the man says in a deflated voice.
It's an exchange that should be familiar to anyone who's seen To Catch a Predator — especially that iconic TV moment when host Chris Hansen emerges from a side room, and the cameras zoom in on the suddenly sweat-slicked face of a man realizing he's walked into a trap, as Hansen drops the now-infamous line, "Why don't you take a seat right over there."
Green doesn't use the line, and he's certainly no ultra-composed, TV-ready reporter like Hansen. On the Facebook video from Saturday, Green opens by telling the man that he's not a cop, but then adds, "I work with police."
Then Green really lays into him:
"The fuck are you thinking man? Did you read the things you were saying to this girl? We could totally take everything to your boss and everything else. I'm interested in why in the hell you're trying to ruin a little girl's life that's a virgin."
The man with the mustache just stands there, taking Green's verbal barrage. He drops his head to his chest, repeating, "I don't know man, I don't know."
Anthony Green, the trucker behind Truckers Against Predators. - SCREENSHOT VIA FACEBOOK
Reached by phone a few days after the sting, Green explains that he's a longtime fan of citizen-led efforts to identify and publicly shame child predators, especially a group called The Ultimate Decoy. Dozens of other groups are active across the U.S. and overseas, with the hunters generally uploading videos of confrontations with men — and it's always men — who are lured into the trap by decoys acting as minors.
"I just feel like there's a movement, there's at least twenty different hunter teams in the country," he says. "We just based ours around trucking because that’s what I do."
Indeed, Green follows a long line of similar efforts. The most prominent, NBC's To Catch a Predator, had just a two-year run from 2006 to 2008 before being canceled in the wake of a target, a prosecutor, committing suicide. The Internet group NBC worked with, Perverted Justice, had a track record predating the show, and boasted more than 100 convictions.
But the show came under heavy criticism. Beyond the civil rights issues, an expert later told the New Republic, it was simply dangerous. “We see situations that in a second turn volatile,” James Drylie, a professor of criminal justice at Kean University, told the magazine. “Imagine hearing: ‘lights, camera, action, you’re on TV.’ A person can just explode — they’re looking to escape and they’ll use any means.”
That hasn't happened yet to Green. (He says he carries a firearm for protection during the stings.) It also doesn't take a TV production to seek out targets. It's depressingly easy.
Here's how Green sets up a sting: First, decoys identifying themselves as adult women will post on various social media and messaging apps — apps like MeetMe, Whispr, Musicly.ly, MeetMe, LiveMe and Plenty of Fish, he alleges, are "terrible safe havens for pedophiles." These initial posts aren't explicitly geared towards predators, but rather offer an innocuous invitation, something like a 26-year-old woman in town for a night and looking to hang out.
"Within ten minute we'll get 80 to 100 responses," Green says. After two or three messages, however, the decoy "reveals" that she's not 26, but fourteen. At that point, about 50 percent of the respondents stop communicating, Green says.
Overall, Green claims that his decoys are currently working 100 concurrent conversations, all with men who appear interested in meeting up with girls only a few years older than Green's own twelve-year-old daughter.
After the initial contact, the decoys arrange a meeting — always a public place, preferably late at night or early in the morning, to reduce the possibility of bystanders interfering, Green says.
He adds, "It’s definitely dangerous." Green claims that he consulted St. Louis police officers before launching Truckers Against Predators earlier this month. An officer told him not to get involved, he says, for the sake of his own safety.
But Green says the risk is worth it. The trucker says he himself was sexually abused as a child, and he believes that citizen-led hunter groups are doing vital work, raising awareness that predators exist online and in real life, in great numbers, and that they're constantly looking for victims.
"These people are your neighbors," Green says. "Whenever I meet one of these guys, I feel like I've actually saved a child that night. And instead of them meeting up with a little kid, they meet up with a 350-pound man."
For Green, perhaps the hardest part of the job is keeping his cool when getting face-to-face with the sort of person who would drive to a gas station at 2:30 a.m. with condoms and the intention of taking a fourteen-year-old girl's virginity.
On Saturday night, Green admits, he lost his composure. On the video — which, as of this writing, has nearly 40,000 views — he spends more than ten minutes castigating his target, telling him that he'll likely be raped in prison and that maybe he should just jump off a bridge.
At one point, Green threatens to call the cops to the gas station if the man keeps evading his questions. Later, Green appears to yell toward some bystanders, informing them that the man had tried to have sex with a fourteen-year-old. Off-camera, someone shouts back, "Knock his ass out!" and "You should be killed motherfucker!" and "Cut his balls off!" "Do you know how bad I want to turn this camera off right now," Green asks the man. "There's no curing people like you. None. No fucking cure."
During his later interview, Green tells RFT that he regrets involving the bystanders and that he won't do it again — not out of sympathy for the target of the sting, but because one of those bystanders could have taken matters into their own hands. That wouldn't be good for Green.
"If someone would have hurt him, I would have been held responsible," Green says. Still, he understands the impulse to hurt predators. Considering his own experience as a sex-abuse victim, he says that if he was in the bystander's position, "I might take a swing at him. I might."
Green maintains that he's not a vigilante, and that he's not out to bring violent retribution on the predators he hunts. He wants arrests. However, to date, only one man — a target in Texas — has left the scene of a sting in police custody.
"I'm working closely with police to try to attain arrests," Green says. "If a DA doesn't want to pick up charges because I'm not a police officer, then what I'm going to do is not expose them live. What I'm going to do is still expose them, but I’m still going to give all of the chat logs to the police up front, beforehand, so they can do their sting."
Reached Monday by email, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Michelle Woodling says that the department is aware of the Saturday incident.
"We have nothing further at this time as the investigation is ongoing," she writes.
It's not clear whether Green's sting operations will lead to charges in Missouri. The state statute defining the crime of Enticement of a Child seems expressly written to exclude non-police sting operations. The statute includes a provision that reads, "It is not a defense to a prosecution for a violation of this section that the other person was a peace officer masquerading as a minor." So what if the other person isn't a police officer at all? Is that a defense? Would the evidence gathered prior to the live-streamed confrontation give police legal cover to arrest the perp, or, for that matter, for a prosecutor to issue charges?
Green thinks it should.
"The law is kind of gray," he admits. "If the police don’t want to pick up prosecution, then we’re going to go to the public and get 100, 200,000 signatures and we’re going to go to the state legislature to try to get the law changed."
Yet even in the absence of prosecution, Green is making an impact. According to people posting on the Saturday video, the mustachioed man is an employee of several local bars, most recently Hendrick's BBQ in St. Charles. A manager there Monday hangs up on a reporter when asked about the man by name. Hendrick's told a concerned citizen who reached out via private message that the man was no longer an employee.
For Green, the social result — the public awareness — makes his own efforts worthwhile, even the guy doesn't end up behind bars.
"I feel like internet justice is sometimes is better than criminal justice," he says. "These men are not innocent; they are attempting to meet a child for sexual activity. I'm not a vigilante, and jail is really what I want, but I definitely think there’s a big value of the internet exposures. Maybe more so than jail."
This man is Curtis J. Hart, a "libertarian politician" from Kelso, WA. In addition to running a small-time online radio show and generally making an ass of himself, and losing elections by landslides in podunk towns, Hart runs his own joke of an online vigilante team called "The Punisher Squad." What a joke. I guess he must be desperate if he couldn't beat a 70 year old man for a podunk commission seat.
Vigilante group hunting potential child predators in Kelso
Maggie Vespa , KGW 11:19 PM. PST March 04, 2016
KELSO, Wash. -- Ask Curtis Hart if he considers himself a vigilante and you’ll get a blunt answer.
“I’ve been called worse,” he said.
Regardless of the title, Hart says he and roughly five of his friends, who call themselves the Punisher Squad, are serving a vital purpose. They’re catching potential child predators before they have the chance to strike, posting videos of their encounters on YouTube, and only calling police once it’s time for an arrest to be made.
Their first experiment, which happened Thursday, was a success in Hart’s mind.
The proof, being that of 36-year-old Adam Olson, of Castle Rock, who is behind bars, being held on $50,000 bond.
“He believed he was there to meet a 13-year-old girl to have sex with,” said Hart. “The whole thing was exactly like an episode of ‘To Catch a Predator.’”
According to the Kelso police report, Hart and a friend posted a message Thursday in the online app ‘Whisper’.' They posed as a 14-year-old girl, looking to “have fun with an older man”.
“Immediately, I got 30 to 40 responses,” he said.
Hart says he zeroed in on Olson. The two traded selfies, and Hart, still posing as the teen, said he was actually 13.
Quickly, reports show, the conversation became sexual.
“It was absolutely disgusting,” said Hart.
Hart said Olson pressed to meet the fake teen, so he rounded up some buddies, at least one of them armed, and headed to Kelso’s Tom O’Shanter Park.
He said Kelso police had no idea, until Hart and his friends decided it was time for officers to make an arrest, which they did moments later.
“We didn't want to leave it up to the police because you can't just sit around on your hands waiting for government to come and fix everything,” said Hart. “To wait for government is to want your city to end up like Flint, Michigan.”
It’s the same rationale used by similar civilian groups around the world.
The trend, in one city, was dubbed “The Hunter Phenomenon”.
Police elsewhere have pleaded for it to stop, saying it’s ruined lives, put civilians at risk and left would-be slam dunk cases riddled with holes.
KGW reached out to Kelso Police for comment on Olson’s arrest. We were told no one was available.
People living in Kelso and Longview, though, did want to talk about the idea, including David Willis. He has two daughters, and he’s all for it.
“The police are overwhelmed,” he said. “As far as a community, you want people to come together.”
Others were not so sold.
“They're not police,” said Bob Johnson. “They don't have experience. They don't know what they're doing, and we have laws that protect people that haven't done anything yet.”
Prosecutors in Cowlitz County have yet to file formal charges against Olson.
He’s being held on probable cause for one count of second-degree attempted rape of a child and one count of communication with a minor for immoral purposes by electronic means.
