750 sex offenders slip past state law

Loopholes in the law. Stagnant funding. Police agencies that don’t work together. Hundreds of criminals unaccounted for.

This is Arizona’s sex offender registration program — one of the best in the country.

Six Department of Public Safety employees work to verify the addresses of about 13,000 offenders who were released from prison in the state or moved here. Despite requests to the Legislature, the office’s $600,000 annual budget hasn’t changed in the four years since it was launched.

The workload has changed, though. About 800 more sex offenders are released each year in Arizona, said Val Biebrich, the civilian DPS employee who manages the registration unit. In 2001, the office needed 19 months to do verification checks of all the offenders. Now it takes two years.

"It’s going to get worse before it gets better," Biebrich said. "You could almost say you better throw us a life vest, quick."

To its credit, Biebrich said his office can account for all but 5.8 percent of the sex offenders who are supposed to register their whereabouts with authorities. A recent survey of state law enforcement agencies by a private organization, Parents for Megan’s Law, showed an average of 24 percent of "missing" sex offenders nationwide.

Earlier this month, the state launched a $300,000 Sex Crimes Analysis Network, an Internet-based sex offender mapping system that police will be able to use to retrieve detailed information about the sex criminals who must live their entire lives as branded men (and occasionally women). In many respects, the state is doing quite well in the sex offender registration department.

But that 5.8 percent translates to roughly 750 offenders. Experts say many of these socalled "absconders" are probably the most dangerous of their kind, because they could be avoiding police for some devious purpose.

As of Sunday, 174 absconders were listed on the state Web site

Bill Richardson, a former Mesa police officer, said he also believes more effort and resources should be spent on finding unregistered sex offenders. He wonders about people he helped arrest like Frank Amaro, a rapist listed as an absconder on the state’s Web site.

"You look at the depth of the behavior, the depths of the anger and the need for them to be in control," Richardson said. "This isn’t going away. This is part of the way they do things every day, and they’re out there."

Officials point out that it isn’t just registered sex offenders committing sex crimes. Yet sex criminals are prone to reoffend.

"I think DPS has just dropped the ball," Richardson said. "There’s no excuse for that, for having 750 offenders."

Jerry Crumb Jr., 35, served prison time for an offense and failed to register last year.

Crumb, who rammed a woman’s car before sexually assaulting her, had been found in December 2001 by Mesa police and written up for failure to register, a felony.

But he wasn’t taken to jail and charged with that crime until April 26, 2002, a few days after the bodies of Rosina Sorlie and her 4-year-old son, Johnathan, turned up in a remote area of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Police had linked Crumb’s DNA to the crime scene.

DPS isn’t alone in trying to find the absconding sex offenders.

"I put some time into it, as time allows," said Scottsdale police detective Nelson LaPan, who works in the city’s sex crime unit.

LaPan said he will occasionally get tips on absconders or take a few names from the Web site and try to locate them. Some are transients who registered street corners as their addresses, he said.

"Some of them are pretty tough to find," he said. "I’ve got a number of things I do to try to look for them. When those run out, there’s not too many other places to turn."