Recently, I found out that my next door neighbor is a sexual offender. I only know this due to an informational brochure that the police delivered directly to me. The officer delivered one to every home on our street to let us know about our dear neighborly pervert. Now, I am not going to play devil’s advocate too much on this one, simply because my daughter is the same age as his victim.

Now, in my state (no clue nationally), sexual offenders are rated on levels - the degree to which they are accessed and could possibly re-offend. There are four levels in my state and my neighbor is a level 2. Well, here is the breakdown on what I learned.

Level 1: Can live anywhere and you would never know. The police are not by law required to notify anyone that this level offender lives near them. Although this level offender is a registered sex offender, level 1’s do not appear on any public registry for you to look up. There is a 25% likelihood this offender will re-offend.

Level 2: (My neighbor). Can live anywhere, but those on the same street will receive a notification from their local police - only after an assessment has been completed. Although this level offender is a registered sex offender, level 2’s do not appear on any public registry for you to look up. There is a 50% likelihood this offender will re-offend.

Level 3 (high risk) Level 4 (dangerous): Can live anywhere and neighbors will receive notification from their local police. Level 3’s and 4’s do appear on local and national registries for the public to view.  There is a 75% likelihood that level 3’s will re-offend and a possible 100% likelihood that level 4’s will re-offend.

No one can give me a clear answer as to why my neighbor is still in his home and has not served any time. I spoke to a friend that is a former police officer and her response was basically age. Now, I can’t say if this is correct; this is all speculation, but because he is 72 years old it is possible they felt he was too old to prosecute and waste the money on.

He was convicted less than one year ago for Sexual Assault 2nd Degree, his victim - a girl, age five at the time and all he got (looks like it to me anyway) was a slap on the wrist by possibly serving probation. If they didn’t want tax payers to pay the penalty for this sick bastard, then place him on house arrest. That way he would have had to pay the incarceration fee and he couldn’t leave his home. I know I would feel a hell of a lot better knowing he couldn’t go outside of a certain range.

It sickens me to know this man is over there. That if for a split second I had left Miss K alone outside, he could have walked up to her and befriended her. I don’t want to even want to think about what this old pervert could have done. I did discuss with Miss K and Mr C about what this man had done (not in detail); enough for them to understand that he is an extremely bad man that hurts children.

I just think often now about his little victim. My heart aches for this little girl and her family.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Just Stuff, The Bitch Session. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.