09/19/2011
By Amelia Cerling
TOWN OF EAGLE POINT (WEAU) -- Sex offenders are living right next to families with young children in the Town of Eagle Point. Monday evening those parents and other people demanded answers at a town board meeting.
- No matter where they are forced to live, there will always be children!
According to the Department of Corrections, there are 21,000 registered sex offenders in the state of Wisconsin, and 70 of them live in Chippewa County.
Two men recently moved into a home along Highway 124 and neighbors say they weren't properly notified of the men's presence. The two men living in the home at [address withheld] are 45-year-old [name withheld], and 55-year-old [name withheld].
It was a packed town hall Monday night, with the Chippewa County sheriff and two members from the DOC answering questions from a frustrated and often angry crowd.
Brad Martin was in that crowd, he is a father of three young children. He came to Monday night’s town board meeting out of fear for the safety of his kids.
“I think as a parent the biggest fear is for the safety of your children, safety of your neighborhood,” Martin tells us.
Martin says he lives just four tenths of a mile from the sex offenders’ home. He tells us his peaceful and fence free neighborhood has been turned upside down.
“You lose the luxury of, we kind of are living in a community where there’s no fences, you can just go from house to house, and we've kind of lost that now,” he says.
It's that pervasive fear and a flurry of phone calls from concerned neighbors that led Town of Eagle Point chairman Mike Sedlacek to invite the DOC and the sheriff to Monday evening’s meeting.
“It's always a big concern when you have a sexual offender in your neighborhood. Right away you start thinking is there something the town could do to stop this so that's why we are here tonight to find out, and we’ll go from there I guess,” Sedlacek says.
Jodi Voegeli, a sex offender registration specialist answered questions and gave worried parents advice on how to handle living close to a sex offender.
“We tell them to show the picture to their children, don't go into too many details, don't scare the child, but just let them know that this individual has hurt children before, that they shouldn't talk to this individual, or accept rides from this individual, and if they try to talk to them, that they should tell an adult, so they can call police,” Voegeli explains.
