08/31/2011
By Jonathan Kaminsky
How leaving cops to sort out who's dangerous can change lives in an instant.
Eighteen years ago, "Joseph" did something extremely stupid. Early on a July morning, and by his own telling so tweaked out on meth that he had lost his grip on reality, the then-23-year-old crawled through the window into the bedroom of what had been his childhood home and curled up next to the current occupant, a 12-year-old girl, leaving only after she startled awake and turned on the light.
It is an incident that "Joseph", who like other registered sex offenders in this article has been granted anonymity in exchange for freely sharing his story, has quite literally never lived down. Now 41, he resides in the shadow of Mount Adams in southwestern Washington with his common-law wife of five years, their 3-year-old daughter, and her children from two previous relationships, ages 5, 13, and 14. Most afternoons and evenings, while his spouse is at work, it is his responsibility to look after the kids.
On a recent afternoon, the older ones stay in their rooms while the younger two—"Joseph's" daughter and the boy he has raised since he was four months old—compete relentlessly for his attention, treating him as equal parts authority figure and jungle gym.
"Joseph", who wears his hair pulled back in a ponytail, has a long, brown beard flecked with gray and a timeworn face hinting at a past discordant with the loving tone he takes with his children today. A convicted car thief and truant at 15, he spent the bulk of the next six years in juvenile detention. By 21, he'd been nabbed twice on burglary charges. In 1993, after pleading guilty to lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor under 14 for the incident in his old bedroom, he spent more than four years in prison, a stay extended by at least three suicide attempts.
After getting out, "Joseph" attempted to turn his life around. A stint at community college ended with an associate's degree, a pile of student loans, and an accusation, in 1999, that he'd stalked another student. The incident resulted in a parole violation, but no criminal charges.
His most recent arrest, for grabbing an ex-girlfriend's arms and shaking her chair, resulted in a misdemeanor domestic battery conviction. That was in 2003.
He has not reoffended sexually.
"[Joseph] is a great guy, but he's manic-depressive," says the former girlfriend, a psychology professor at the community college he attended, who broke off their five-year relationship in 2005. When he's manic, she says, "he's very forceful, but not in a destructive way." During one episode, she recalls, he spent a weekend sanding down all her floors.
Whether you believe "Joseph" is a man who has overcome his checkered past or a danger to the women and children around him, one thing seems beyond debate: He did not go from being one of these things to the other within the past 18 months. Except, in the eyes of the law, that is exactly what happened.
In February 2010, "Joseph" received a letter from the Klickitat County Sheriff's office. Four years earlier, he'd moved from California, registered as a sex offender, and was made a level 1, the lowest risk to reoffend in Washington state's three-tiered sex-offender classification system. Now, the letter informed him, a county sex-offender panel had revisited his file, and he would become a level 2. The change was not trivial. Previously, only cops and those requesting specific information about him would be aware of his sex-offender status. Now his name and photograph would go up on the public sex-offender website, along with the block he lived on, and police would have the option of going door-to-door to alert his neighbors.
"Joseph's" case highlights a simple but persistent flaw in Washington state's pioneering sex-offender community-notification system, which was born more than two decades ago in the wake of a horrific crime. State corrections officials place risk levels on many of Washington's approximately 20,000 registered sex offenders, the overwhelming majority of them male. But the final decision on the offender's level—and, by extension, whether the public knows he is an offender—resides with the sheriff or the police chief where the offender lives. In some cases, there are delays before files are properly reviewed. In others, sex-offender levels are raised in ways critics say arbitrarily drive offenders out of some areas of the state and into others, including Seattle. In addition, critics contend, the decentralized system adds uncertainty to the lives of sex offenders, increasing the risk they pose to others.
For "Joseph", his new status has had real consequences. Shortly after he became a level 2, he was fired from his job—in part, he believes, because of the level change. With the 5-year-old he's raised as his son set to begin kindergarten in the fall, he worries the boy's classmates will tease him for having a sex offender for a father.
"If it was just me, I wouldn't care," he says. "But I have little ones to take care of."
Earl Shriner was on the prowl the Saturday evening in May 1989 that he came across fair-haired, 7-year-old Ryan Hade riding his bike in the small park near both their homes in south Tacoma. Dragging the boy out of view into a nearby woods, Shriner tied a noose tight around his neck and raped him repeatedly. Before leaving him bloodied, caked in mud, and semiconscious near a drainage ditch, Shriner cut off Hade's penis.
