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?
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 Lecters 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.
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?
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?
First, let me hit you with just the first paragraph from the AP article that’s making the rounds about MySpace’s proposed new safety measures.
Under mounting pressure from law enforcement and parents, MySpace agreed Monday to take steps to protect youngsters from online sexual predators and bullies, including searching for ways to better verify users’ ages.
The fact that parents are pressuring MySpace is a joke. If parents were actually parenting, I would say more than half the stories on this site wouldn’t have happened.
Here are some of the things MySpace said they will do for lax parents. Ok, I made up the lax parents part.
Under the agreement, profiles for users under age 16 will be set to private so no strangers can get information from their profile; users can block anyone over 18 from contacting them; and people over 18 cannot add anyone under 16 as a friend in their network unless they have their last name or their e-mail address.
All of these can be circumvented by the underage user if the parents aren’t paying attention.
Another new feature will be the following…
MySpace said it is in the process of creating a database where parents can submit children’s e-mail addresses to prevent their children from setting up profiles.
And it only takes your kid about a minute to set up another e-mail address that you don’t know about.
In my opinion, age verification won’t work either, even if you need a credit card to sign up with MySpace. First of all, MySpace will never do that because their userbase will plummet. Secondly, it wouldn’t take much for a kid to slide the credit card out of mom or dad’s wallet, use it to sign up on MySpace, then slide back unnoticed.
There is no greater security measure than good parenting.
Sometimes the media cracks me up. Take for instance this article by the local Fox affiliate in Kansas City about the Megan Meier case dated 1/10/08.
The Washington Post reports that someone established a Web site a few weeks ago to degrade Megan Meier’s character. The site has since been taken down, and no one knows who set it up.
Wrong.
First of all, the website, the infamous Megan Had it Coming, is still up and secondly, Encyclopedia Dramatica already admitted to the hoax. I posted about it here over a month ago, as did a lot of other bloggers.
Mr. Clean, over there, is 37-year-old Edward Oberwise of Hillsborough County, Florida. He’s been arrested for allegedly having sex with a 12-year-old girl he met on MySpace.
Police were tipped off by the girl’s 14-year-old friend, who told her parents.
So let’s hear it, sex offender defenders. Please tell me how you think that this man who was 25 years older than his victim was not at fault.
