____ ____ is serving a life prison sentence — but not because, like many in that situation, he killed someone.
____, 69, has repeatedly exposed his genitals in public with sexual intent. In 2012, after a Marion County jury found him guilty of that conduct again, a judge sentenced him to life without any hope of being released. Full Article
On Oregon Supreme Court….I knew this guy……Been reading everything CA RSOL for almost two years now. Read this article a few days ago .Was shocked to read about someone I haven’t seen for over twenty years. Here’s a personal story about the times I knew that person, who went by the name of Mike.
In 1987 I was a year into my weekly outpatient sex offender treatment program in Portland, Oregon. We were all required to do something socially where no children would be present. I choose Ballroom Dancing and was doing well with it when the program director assigned Mike to me who was also in the program to get him into dancing. Mike really took to it. He eventually got a girlfriend who danced too. They stayed together till she died of ovarian cancer many years later of which I just found out.
I finished the program, got off probation, and moved away only to return to Portland some years later. I contacted Mike’s girlfriend, and she let me stay in an extra room in her house. She lived south of Portland in a rural town. Mike lived apart in his apartment some twenty miles away close to Portland. They saw each at least weekly.
Things stayed this way and I was comfortable living like this. But then it happened: The police called his girlfriend at home one morning. Mike was in jail out on the Oregon coast and wanted her to bring some things he needed.
It was news: An entire beach community was in shock of the young child kidnapped off the beach in broad daylight including the father quickly finding them and Mike getting badly beaten.
I’m telling this because It deeply affected me. Here I am a convicted child molester, but I was “cured”; it had been years since my first and only offense. Yet there’s Mike. This is his SECOND offense and a particularly gruesome one at that !
Over the ensuing months his girlfriend stood by his side through courts, bail, sentencing, and prison. I hated this guy for what he did, and disliked her for helping him, but I kept my feelings to myself, and reluctantly helped as little as I could.
Finally, the local paper in the rural town where she (and me) lived did an article about Mike staying with us before going to prison. That, and a few other things, and I left taking all my hypocracy with me. I never saw or talked with them again. That was the mid 1990’s.
Those were the times I knew Mike. I never re offended , but in reading the recent article he did. Does that make me better?
Gerald, thank you very much. Hank.