By Paris Rain, FOX23.com News Staff
WAGONER COUNTY, Okla. — Since May, the Wagoner County Sheriff’s Office has arrested eight people on child sex crime charges using an undercover decoy posing as a teenage girl.
“All the charges are a little bit different,” explained Wagoner County Sheriff Chris Elliott. “They all revolve around somebody having contact with whom they believe is a minor and where they are having lewd or indecent proposal acts or offering things to them trying to set up meets. We actually have an undercover operative here at the sheriff’s office that is communicating with them. Then, [we] actually set up a meet and then we go out and we affect the arrest it.”
Sheriff Elliot said the operation is made possible thanks to WCSO’s partnership with the Department of Justice’s Internet Crimes Against Children Division.
One of the investigators assisting with the operation said these kinds of suspects put a lot of time and planning into their crimes.
“We’re not talking about just a run of the mill assault on somebody. We’re talking about people that specifically and willingly drove hundreds of miles with the intent to pay a 14 or 15-year-old to have sex with them.”
WCSO’s operation began after they were given some details about a situation with a suspect reaching out to a decoy they thought was a young girl.
“[The suspect sent] communication of attempting to, when they met, ‘let’s get in my car. Let’s get in my truck. Let’s get in my vehicle.’ We have no idea what the ultimate goal was. We only knew that they had committed a crime by soliciting sex from a minor. What would have happened after that, we don’t know. We’re just glad that the ones we knew that had significant ill intentions, we’re able to stop them before they actually perpetrate it on a real child.”
Sheriff Elliott said parents have to be aware of who their children are communicating with online because predators are getting creative.
“Parents have to be very vigilant in understanding what their children are doing. They have gotten so good at it that a child can download an app that appears to be a game, but once the child downloads the app, come to find out, it’s a chatroom. It may start out where they think they’re talking to other children, but there’s sexual predators out there waiting for them to come on. Then they start trying to figure out how to get in contact with them.”
Sheriff Elliott said sheriff’s office’s partnerships with the Wagoner County District Attorney and other law enforcement agencies are also vital to the operation.
