FBI Seeks Sexual Predator, Elby Jessie Hars, for UNLAWFUL FLIGHT TO AVOID PROSECUTION - CRIMINAL SEXUAL CONDUCT WITH A MINOR (SECOND DEGREE)

November 6, 2007 on 10:47 pm | In FBI's Most Wanted - Sexual Predators | No Comments

Aliases: Jessie Elby Hars, Elby Hars, Jessie E. Hars, Elby J. Hars

DESCRIPTION
Date of Birth Used: June 24, 1943 Hair: Gray (Balding)
Place of Birth: Bradford County, Florida Eyes: Hazel
Height: 5′8″ Sex: Male
Weight: 245 pounds Race: White
NCIC: W021424981 Nationality: American
Occupation: Licensed Commercial Truck Driver (Hazmat Certified)
Scars and Marks: Hars has scars on both of his arms.
Remarks: Hars may have a shaved head. Hars may have fled to Texas or Mexico.

CAUTION
Elby Jessie Hars, a convicted child sex offender, is currently wanted for his alleged involvement in sexual activity with a minor girl. The crime occurred in Richland County, South Carolina, in 2000.

A state arrest warrant was issued in April of 2000 by a Richland County General Sessions Magistrate after Hars was charged with multiple counts of criminal sexual conduct with a minor (second degree). In March of 2001, Hars was charged federally with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution by the United States District Court, District of South Carolina, and a federal warrant was issued for his arrest.

Sexual Predator in the New England area! - FBI’s 10 Most Wanted

October 14, 2007 on 8:57 am | In FBI's Most Wanted - Sexual Predators | No Comments

FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives 

 

UNLAWFUL FLIGHT TO AVOID PROSECUTION - AGGRAVATED FELONIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT, FELONIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT; POSSESSION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY (23 COUNTS)

JON SAVARINO SCHILLACI

Aliases: Jon Schillaci, Jon S. Schillaci, Jon Willis, Christopher Keegan, Cody Keegan

DESCRIPTION
Date of Birth: December 14, 1971 Hair: Brown
Place of Birth: Oklahoma Eyes: Brown
Height: 5′11″ Complexion: Light
Weight: 180 pounds Sex: Male
Build: Medium Race: White
Occupations: Salesman at a music store; Computer Specialist Nationality: American
Scars and Marks: None known
Remarks: Schillaci has ties to New Hampshire; Texas; and Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico. He is well educated and is believed to have completed two Masters Degrees in Humanities and Literature. Schillaci is known to speak Spanish, French, and German.

CAUTION
JON SAVARINO SCHILLACI, A CONVICTED SEX OFFENDER, IS WANTED FOR THE ALLEGED SEXUAL ASSAULT OF A YOUNG BOY IN DEERFIELD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, IN OCTOBER OF 1999. SCHILLACI HAD CORRESPONDED WITH THE VICTIM’S FAMILY WHILE SERVING TIME IN PRISON IN TEXAS FOR PRIOR SEXUAL ASSAULT CHARGES. AFTER HIS RELEASE FROM PRISON, THE FAMILY PROVIDED SCHILLACI A HOME FROM WHICH TO START HIS NEW LIFE, DURING WHICH TIME THE ALLEGED MOLESTATION OCCURRED.

CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING THIS PERSON, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL FBI OFFICE OR THE NEAREST U.S. EMBASSY OR CONSULATE.

REWARD
The FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading directly to the arrest of Jon Savarino Schillaci.

September 2007

Elgin police officer left child porn at office, officials say

September 23, 2007 on 8:25 am | In In the News | No Comments

Former Elgin police officer Orval Roger Miller is arrested on child pornography possession charges by the state attorney general’s Cyber Crime Unit. ELGIN Ex-officer indicted on child pornography charge A Bastrop County grand jury indicted a former Elgin police officer Tuesday after he left a thumb drive containing child pornography in a Police Department computer, officials said. Orval Roger Miller, 46, was arrested by Texas attorney general’s investigators Wednesday evening and booked into the Bastrop County Jail. Miller faces up to 10 years in state prison and a $10,000 fine on each of two counts of child pornography possession. In May, another Elgin police officer found a thumb drive in a department computer containing a video of children being sexually assaulted, a spokeswoman from the attorney general’s office said. The thumb drive also contained Miller’s résumé and other personal documents, according to the attorney general’s office. Miller, who previously worked as a community college police officer in Austin, is no longer an Elgin police officer, the attorney general’s office spokeswoman said. Elgin Police Chief Jack Hensley did not return calls seeking the date Miller left the department.

Protecting children online

September 11, 2007 on 8:31 am | In In the News | No Comments

State launching cybersafety program for middle and high school students

By Katherine Lewis

Monday, September 10, 2007

L-M-I-R-L.

To most of us, they are simple letters. But for children, the combination can be dangerous.

“They are probably the four scariest letters in the alphabet,” Attorney General Bill McCollum told about 70 kids Monday in Collier County. “Do you know what LMIRL means? It means, ‘Let’s meet in real life.’ The problem is, you might think you are meeting another 13-year-old. The truth is, you just don’t know who you’re talking to.”

McCollum knows people preying on children are no longer just on the streets.

“The stranger is in your bedroom,” he told the middle school students. “He is on the Internet, in your computer.”

McCollum was talking to the students as part of a statewide initiative to educate students about the dangers of being online. The Florida Attorney General’s Child Predator CyberCrime Unit is addressing the cybersafety issue with students by bringing their program to middle and high schools statewide.

Pine Ridge Middle School was the first school in Collier County to host the program.

Superintendent Dennis Thompson, who introduced McCollum to the students, said children need to be aware of hidden dangers in the online world. Dangers that their parents might not be aware of.

“I’ve always said one thing students know better than their parents is electronic media,” he said.

McCollum told the students that there are 77 million children nationwide on the Internet. Of those, one of every seven will be solicited for sex.

A couple of students said they had been solicited to send photos of themselves to strangers.

“I blocked the person who sent it to me,” said Mia Prio, 13.

Representatives from McCollum’s office urged students to report any inappropriate activity. McCollum told the students if they were afraid to tell their parents or another adult, they could report the activity anonymously at safeflorida.net.

“Your parents don’t need to know. Your friends don’t need to know,” he said. “We need to be able to track the bad guys down. The only way we are going to be able to do that is if you tell us who they are.”

To ensure the students didn’t forget the e-mail address, each student received a blue wristband with the e-mail address on it.

Eldra Cartwright, a victim’s advocate with the state Attorney General’s Office, told the students predators will promise them all they want, including love, romance, friendship, independence and freedom.

She also told the students that predators can be anyone, showing them photos of men who had been arrested for soliciting children and other crimes. The photos included mug shots of a police detective, a karate instructor, a maintenance worker and a carnival worker.

“It could be anybody from any walk of life,” she said.

Students said the presentation was informative.

“It’s amazing how easy it was to get to you,” said Lilly Pivar, 13. “It’s scary.”

The eighth-grade students who heard Monday’s presentation are all part of the Pine Ridge Middle School family and consumer science class on life choices.

Teacher Sandra Thomas said the students will create a campaign on raising cybersafety awareness in school. She said the students will develop posters and brochures that will be available to their fellow students.

“This is a great age to get them. Kids are very active on the Internet. It is a great way to do peer teaching,” she said. “It gets them thinking, aware of how to be safe.”

State Educating Residents on Cyber Safety

September 7, 2007 on 9:36 am | In In the News | No Comments

The state of Michigan wants to educate kids on how to keep internet predators away. The Attorney General’s Office plans to teach children and parents about cyber safety. Every day tens of thousands of children in Michigan log on to the internet. The attorney general says that every day there are child predators online looking for the right opportunity to strike.

Mike Cox, Michigan Attorney General: “We know, literally, and just in Michigan chat rooms alone, there’s hundreds of folks out there.”

It’s those criminals that the attorney general wants to shut down. Mike cox unveiled Michigan CSI. It’s an educational program that targets students and their parents. The Lansing school district is one of three in mid-Michigan that participated in the pilot program.

Dr. TC Wallace, Superintendent, Lansing School District: “In today’s times, this particular initiative, though won’t solve all of the issues, but we really can start to contribute to the safe environment.”

That environment begins with a four-part program. The first piece is tailored for 2nd and 3rd graders. The next speaks to fourth and fifth graders. Sixth through eighth graders get a stronger message that includes real stories of cyber victims. The fourth piece targets parents with online tutorials for sites like Facebook and Myspace.
Sep 6, 2007 08:14 AM EDT
Marsali Hancock, President, Internet Keep Safe Coalition: “They really did morph and customize the material and the message to really be relevant here for Michigan.”

The attorney general says each program takes about an hour to complete, a small amount of time to invest in keeping children safe from internet predators. You can see materials from the Michigan CSI program by visiting the attorney general’s website here. Parents will have access to their part of the program next week when Comcast Cable includes it in its “on demand” service.

Man, 24, charged with rape of teen

August 29, 2007 on 5:24 pm | In In the News | No Comments

By SARAH LARSON
phillyBurbs.com

A relationship between a man and a 15-year-old Warminster girl that began on MySpace.com, police said, ended with a cocaine-spiked sexual encounter in a Doylestown Township home.

Now, the 24-year-old man involved is under arrest, charged with drug possession and statutory rape and related charges.

Christopher Leasher of Aster Road, Warminster, was arrested Tuesday and arraigned in District Judge Philip J. Daly’s court in Warrington. His parents posted $20,000 bond to keep him out of jail while awaiting trial on charges that prosecutors said stemmed from his Internet solicitation of the girl.

District Attorney Diane Gibbons said the case should galvanize every parent into actively monitoring and guiding their children on the Web.

“Parents always say to me, “I don’t want to invade my child’s privacy,’ ” Gibbons said Tuesday during a press conference. But by allowing kids and teens unsupervised access to the online world, parents are tacitly authorizing contact far beyond the keyboard.

“You are giving that child permission to go to places you would never physically allow them to go,” Gibbons said.

Middletown attorney Richard Fink is Leasher’s attorney of record, though another lawyer accompanied Leasher to court. Fink could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Gibbons said a hearing date has not yet been set.

While out on bail, Leasher cannot use the Internet, officials said, citing a condition set by Daly.

The case began more than two months ago when the girl contacted a police officer.

On June 18, the girl told Doylestown police that she had interacted online for at least a month with a man known on MySpace as “Christopher Jive.” On the social networking Web site, the man said he was 23 years old (he has since turned 24) and a musician, a claim Gibbons skewered as delusions of grandeur.

“He doesn’t work, he lives off the incomes of others and happens to play an instrument,” the DA said.

Police said the girl told them that “Chris” had asked her repeatedly to meet in person to have sex; he gave her his cell phone number.

On June 11, the girl met him in the parking lot of the Warminster Kmart, according to court papers. They drove in his black Scion coupe down to Philadelphia, so he could buy cocaine, the papers allege.

They then drove to the home of Leasher’s friend Chris Gunderson, 45, on Cottonwood Court in Doylestown Township, arriving about 9 p.m., police said.

At the house, police say Leasher gave the girl cocaine and “blue pills” they think were the attention-deficit disorder drug Adderall. The girl took both drugs willingly, police said.

Police said the girl told them Leasher had sex with her throughout the night, even though she, at one point, became so feverish from the drugs that he had to put her in a bathtub of water to cool her down.

The girl passed out about 7 a.m. and slept until 4 p.m., at which point the man drove her back to Warminster and dropped her off near her father’s apartment, court records say. The girl told police she felt the effects of the drugs for another two days, according to the records.

After hearing the girl’s story, Doylestown police referred the case to Bucks County detectives. Detective Timothy Carroll was able to trace the cell phone number the girl provided to Leasher in Warminster. During the investigation, Leasher moved out of his parents’ house and into an apartment in Montgomery County with a girlfriend.

Leasher admitted to meeting the girl on MySpace, calling her a “teenybopper” and one of his “young fans,” according to court papers. He also admitted to buying the cocaine, though he denies giving it to the girl, the papers allege.

He also admitted to sexual contact with her, according to records. Police said the girl said she was a willing participant in the night’s activities. But Gibbons said that isn’t so.

“The decision she made was made while she was high on cocaine,” Gibbons said. “The law protects children because children do dumb things.”

Gunderson, who police said was upstairs in his bedroom when the alleged assault took place, does not face any charges, Gibbons said, noting that failing to report a crime is not, in itself, a crime in Pennsylvania. Calls to Gunderson’s house Tuesday seemed to go to a fax machine line.

On Tuesday afternoon, Leasher’s MySpace page was populated with come-ons from girls in provocative poses.

Kathy Bennett, of the advocacy group Network of Victim Assistance, said many teenage girls welcome attention from an older, “cool” guy, not fully understanding where it could lead.

“For them, it’s just an older guy who is paying attention to them, and it’s flattering,” Bennett said. “They don’t realize the criminal nature of it all.”

The best way to prevent situations like this is for parents to begin talking to their children about Internet safety when kids first begin to log on, said Mary Worthington, who coordinates NOVA’s education programs for elementary schools on such topics as Internet safety and cyber-bullying.

Kids who start using the Internet when they’re 3, 4 or 5 years old reach adolescence thinking of the Web as a safe place where everyone is a friend, Worthington said.

“We’re grooming our children to be tech savvy, which is a wonderful thing,” Worthington said. “But it’s just like driving a car. There are rules and there are safety guidelines that have to be followed.”

This is the third case this week in Bucks County involving older men allegedly having sexual affairs with teenage girls.

At the same time Gibbons and First Assistant District Attorney Dave Zellis discussed charges against Leasher, testimony continued in a courtroom below in the trial of Ward Motz. The 39-year-old US Airways pilot, who now lives in Berks County, is accused of having a sexual relationship in 2000 and 2001, when he lived in Pipersville, with a girl who was 14 at the time.

The woman, who is now 22, said the relationship and the sex was consensual.

Motz, who retired this year from the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, denies the charges, and his attorney, Sara Webster, said she will prove that Motz was away on some of the dates of the alleged assaults.

Also on Tuesday, Jose Angel Nunez, 38, of Quakertown pleaded guilty before county Judge Albert Ceparullo to sexual assault, statutory sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault and indecent exposure involving a 14-year-old girl.

Australia to spend $189 million on anti-porn tech initiative

August 16, 2007 on 10:04 am | In In the News | No Comments

By Ryan Paul | Published: August 14, 2007 - 09:11AM CT
Australia’s prime minister John Howard and opposition leader Kevin Rudd revealed the Australian government’s sweeping new $189 million anti-pornography initiative on Friday at an event hosted by the Australian Christian Lobby. During the presentation, which was broadcast to over 700 Australian churches, Howard discussed Christian values and described the government’s latest costly plans for preventing pictures of naked people from clogging The Tubes.

Approximately $89 million will be used to establish Australia’s National Filter Scheme, which will impose burdensome filtering requirements on ISPs and provide Australian citizens with free* access to PC-based Internet filtering software. The filtering systems will leverage the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s official Blacklist, which is based on the country’s National Classification Scheme. According to a statement issued on Friday by communications minister Helen Coonan, the Australian Communications and Media Authority is also evaluating plans to extend the Blacklist to include “terrorism and cyber-crime sites upon prescription by the Attorney-General.”

Approximately $22 million will be spent on a broad “public awareness and education campaign” to inform parents of Internet safety issues, and another $11.7 million will be used to establish community outreach programs that will push “the Internet safety message” into thousands of schools. Additionally, the government plans to establish a consultative working group to find a “workable solution” to combat “the use of social networking web sites by predators to contact and groom children via the internet.”

Only last year, the Australian government spent $116 million on a similar initiative, $93 million of which was used to provide free* Internet filtering software to families for a three-year period. At the time, Coonan said in a statement that the government’s three separate studies on the efficacy of ISP-level filtering found “significant problems with content filter products operating at the ISP-level,” and Coonan cited ease of circumvention and limited filtering control when arguing that ISP-level filtering isn’t as effective as PC-based filtering. It is ironic that Australia’s latest costly anti-pornography initiative leverages the same kind of ISP-level filtering technologies that were dismissed as inadequate only a year ago. One wonders what kind of improvements have been in the filtering technology field since then.

New threat to students: Cyber bullying

August 12, 2007 on 7:50 am | In In the News | No Comments

By Liz Carey (Contact)
Saturday, August 11, 2007

The schoolyard bully has moved into the digital age.

Children are just as likely these days to be bullied through Web sites, text messages and e-mails as they are to be hit on the playground for their lunch money.

According to Parry Aftab, a national expert on cyber bullying and the executive director of WiredSaftey.org, a Web site dedicated to help parents with cyber safety, said between 85 and 97 percent of children age 10-14 she polled said they had been victims of cyber bullying in the past year.

“It has a devastating impact,” she said. “We’ve had six kids commit suicide in the past year in the United States. Too often parents think ‘Sticks and stones, change your e-mail address and get on with it.’ But it’s not that simple.”

“Cyber bullying” is when a minor is targeted for embarrassment, humiliation, torment or threats by another minor using the Internet, computers or other forms of digital technology, such as cell phones.

This type of bullying can take the form of everything from anonymous e-mails that degrade a child, to the posting of altered pictures on Web sites, to polls in chat rooms where students can vote for the ugliest kids in school.

More than just affecting children, Ms. Aftab said, it also could impact parents’ pocketbooks. In some cases, cyber bullies have sent hundreds of text messages to a child’s cell phone, costing parents hundreds of dollars in usage charges.

But parents can help their children in many ways, she said.

“Parents need to know what kind of technology they are putting into their kids hands. … They need to know if there is a way to block others,” she said. “It requires that parents are open enough with their kids that if something does happen, they will come to them without fear. … Most of the children we have surveyed said they hide it intentionally from their parents,” she said.

Parents also need to know, she said, that many children who are victims of cyber bullying are bullies themselves.

“What counts in cyber bullying is who clicks last,” she said.

Parents should teach children to calm down and walk away, she said. Additionally, parents can teach children to respect other people, even online.

Clemson psychology professor Robin Kowalski, co-author of “Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age,” said parents need to be as vigilant about cyber bullying as they are about other threats to their children.

“Cyber bullying is a form of emotional bullying (sometimes referred to as relational aggression) that causes feelings of fear, isolation, and humiliation among its targets,” Ms. Kowalski said on her Web site, www.cyberbullyhelp.com. “Research over the last decade confirms that traditional bullying can seriously affect the mental and physical health of children and their academic work. Children who are bullied are more likely than nonbullied children to be anxious, depressed, and to suffer. They also are more likely than other children to think about taking their own lives. Preliminary research suggests that children who experience cyber bullying may have similar experience and this may be intensified since cyber bullying can occur 24/7.”

To help prevent cyber bullying, Ms. Kowalski and her coauthors suggest parents discuss cyber bullying with their children and make it clear that using technology to embarrass or hurt others is not part of their family values.

Additionally, the authors recommend urging children not to remain bystanders but to speak out against cyber bullying if they witness it and to report it to the appropriate adults.