23-year-old Anthony McGrew has been arrested for sexually abusing two underage girls, one of which he met on MySpace.
The Story County Sheriff’s Office says 23-year-old Anthony McGrew of Melbourne met one of the girls on MySpace.
They met in person two weeks later. That’s when authorities say McGrew sexually abused the 14-year-old Nevada girl. “At 23 years old, you’d know the difference as far as what’s appropriate and what’s not as far as a 14-year-old,” says Lt. Dru Toresdahl.
The next time they agreed to meet, the girl brought a friend. Authorities say both were sexually abused. The Sheriff’s office was contacted by the girl’s parent, who found a note she had written a friend.
So what kind of excuse do you think the enablers will make this time?
A. She said she was 16.
B. Anthony’s a nice guy and would never do anything like this
C. The victims are sluts
D. It’s ok to have sex with 14-year-olds
E. All of the above.
This is a great article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about how MySpace’s ‘pact’ with the Attorneys General is pretty much useless. Who says so? Why Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett says so.
That’s because the safety barriers it prescribes depend largely on MySpace subscribers’ truthfully reporting their ages when creating online profiles. And it offers no reliable means of identifying or policing the suspected millions who do not.
“I’ve been arguing this point for more than a year now,” said Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, who considers the agreement more blueprint than panacea. “Age verification has been the number-one issue for us from the very beginning.”
Until that nut is cracked, no set of guidelines can keep 12-year-olds from registering their virtual selves as adults, or stop 60-year-old creeps from masquerading online as high school cheerleaders.
Yet none of the Attorneys General have come up with a realistic way on how to verify age on the internet.
The article also at the very end prescribes to common sense.
But police say the best security of all is a vigilant parent – one who knows a child’s passwords, monitors his online friends and activities, and keeps the computer in a public area of the home. Some even buy spyware that can record their kids’ online conversations and Web visits.
“A lot of parents don’t want to do that because they don’t want to invade their kids’ privacy,” said Montgomery County Detective Ray Kuter, an Internet-crime expert. “I say, ‘You are the parent. You need to decide what to do.’ ”
“Parents,” Kuter said, “are the best monitoring program we know of.”
The police know this why don’t the Attorneys General?
Every time I make a post about Facebook vigilantism I hear the song “Ghost Riders in The Sky” by The Outlaws in my head.
Anyway, Facebook Vigilantes have struck again. This time the vigilantism has crept over our northern border and is now taking place in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
At Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon a male student who I won’t name was accused of a sexual assault against a female student.
Before even law enforcement caught wind of it a Facebook group targeting him was made. It was later removed.
According to the Information Week article, the alleged victim went to the local media and as of the time of IW’s article had still not reported it to police.
Even to her own admission, the victim admits she initiated the encounter but then changed her mind.
Let’s just for a second say that her story is true. Personally, I’m not buying it but let’s just say it is. By going public with the alleged aggressor’s name not only into Facebook but also into the media she’s probably ruined any chance of him being prosecuted.
Let the law do it’s job people. When you pull stunts like this justice doesn’t get served, it gets turned away at the door.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about Kevin Ray Underwood. He’s the slimeball from Purcell, Oklahoma who is accused of killing 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin so he could consume her flesh. That’s right folks. Kevin the Cannibal. It’s not the Hannibal Lechters you have to worry about, it’s the guy next door.
Anyway, a judge has made a decision on whether or not Underwood’s confession will be heard in court but the decision has been sealed. It’s more than likely we won’t know the judge’s decision until the trial starts on the 19th.
Prosecutors say that Underwood freely confessed to the murder and gave permission to police to search his house after he asked for an attorney.
“When a defendant requests an attorney, you don’t have to get them one,” she said. “All that has to be done is to cease interrogation, and that was done.”
That quote was from Assistant District Attorney Susan Caswell.
The defense argues that…
While agents were not required to stop Underwood from talking about the crime after he asked for a lawyer, it does not mean that the testimony can be allowed in court.
Defense attorneys argued that the environment surrounding Underwood was designed to break his will, citing these reasons:
•Not securing Underwood in a holding cell;
•Delays getting booked into jail and being arraigned;
•Asking Underwood to sign a search waiver after he asked for a lawyer.
Defense lawyers argue that when someone invokes their constitutional rights, that means officers can’t question them any further and they can’t ask the suspect for permission to search their house.
Excuse me while I rant for just a moment.
How in the hell do these criminal defense attorneys sleep at night? This isn’t ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ we’re talking about. Underwood admits that he murdered a 10-year-old red-headed girl with freckles and glasses so he could cannibalize her corpse. Her body was found in his apartment. In my opinion, some criminals are beyond defense and Underwood is one of them. As far as I’m concerned he should be fed to a pack of wild dogs for what he did. Yet these attorneys want to weasel their way to an acquittal knowing full well what he’s guilty of. Maybe selling your soul makes it so you don’t require sleep. Maybe criminal defense attorneys like this are nothing more than the undead. The fact that this scumbag has even the slightest chance of being released scares me more than any vampire or zombie movie.
Anyway, the trial will take place in Norman, Oklahoma due to a change of venue request. I hope the change of scenery doesn’t help his case at all.
From the state that brought you such ‘luminaries’ as Scott Shefelbine and David Leonard comes the story of one Christopher Griswold.
He’s a 21-year-old male from the Constitution State who caught by a 12-year-old girl’s mother trying to lure the 12-year-old for sex over MySpace.
Region 10 School Superintendent Alan Beitman had some great advice for parents that I’m sure will fall on deaf ears.
“Parents need to be sure their computer is in a place that’s visible” so they can keep some control over their children’s activities online, Beitman said. “They don’t have to sit with their children — just walk by the computer once in a while.”
By the way, Connecticut, how is all that new MySpace legislation working for you?
The author of the article takes MySpace to task for their pointless new safety measures. He also suggests that instead of giving your child’s e-mail address to MySpace to keep them from it, he suggests giving your IP address instead.
I think that’s a great suggestion, but it’s just as flawed as the e-mail plan.
There are sites and software out there called anonymizers which easily mask your IP address, making any IP block useless.
Whatever block MySpace can think of, kids and predators have already thought of a way around it.
Actual parental involvement is the best line of defense in my book.
26-year-old Ian Stuart Johnson of Calgary, Alberta, Canada pleaded guilty to child porn charges. It seems that Johnson would lure underage girls over the Canadian social site Nexopia offering them money and alcohol.
Every time a Nexopia user would complain about Johnson they would shut down his account only to have him open a new one.
The prosecutor said all of the communications Johnson had was with females who reside in Calgary and were between 14 and 18 years old.
The correspondence, which occurred under the user names satellite_eye, Secureca, Coca-cola55 and dmwarehouse – all Johnson’s – occurred between August 2002 and February 2005 and elicited several complaints from other Nexopia users, prompting site owner Timo Ewalds to terminate the man’s accounts one by one.
While I’m glad that this scumbag is being put away I wonder why it is that you don’t hear about the Canadian government putting pressure on these sites. Maybe they actually think it’s a parent’s job to protect their children.
Robert Fellmeth is the director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego. He’s not happy with the new proposed security measures that MySpace will be putting in place.
I’m just concerned that parents will get a false sense of security that this is all taken care of because they’re handling it — and I don’t think they can handle it.
He also has some advice for you.
Fellmeth says parents need to be the first line of defense in monitoring children’s Internet use.
You don’t send your kids sown a dark alley alone. Why should the internet be any different?
This article from a local Arizona news outlet brings up a great point.
While soccer moms and politicians have their panties in a wad over MySpace, no one is paying attention to the more dangerous site, in my opinion, Stickam.
Stickam is an unmonitored webcam chat site. To the unenlightened, that means that anybody of any age with a webcam can go on Stickam and basically show whatever they want.
The site states that nudity will get you banned, but think about it. Who is really going to complain about nudity, since that’s pretty much what a lot of people are going there hoping to find?
22-year-old Sophie Soto and her husband, 31-year-old Julio Rojas, have been arrested for an assortment of charges. I’ll let the article explain the travesties they’ve committed…
The sordid saga began in late 2006, when Sophie Soto, 22, used the MySpace social networking site to contact one of the girls, prosecutors said Monday in a statement. Soto told the girl that she was an 18-year-old virgin who had sexual relations with girls and was planning to have sex with a boy but was nervous and wanted the girl to be with her, they said.
The girl wrote back to Soto and said she would be there and would take a friend along, and their relationship developed through telephone and Internet instant-message conversations, prosecutors said.
When the girls showed up at Soto’s Queens apartment in January 2007, she liquored them up and took them into a bedroom, where she sexually abused them before her husband, Julio Rojas, 31, had sexual intercourse with all three, District Attorney Richard Brown said.
Later that night, the couple took the girls, who were under 15 but were given fake identification cards, to a Manhattan strip club, where Soto and an exotic dancer dragged them on stage, slipped their clothes off and made them have oral sex with patrons, the district attorney said.
Together, the pair face a 56-count indictment including charges of rape, sexual abuse, and using a child in a sexual performance.
While the ultimate responsibility for these crimes ultimately lays with the multiple rapist scumbags that did this to these poor girls, it still has to be asked.
Where in the hell were these girls’ parents?
Why aren’t the attorneys general looking into that?
