For two nights in late March, 14 men found an opportunity over the Internet to have sex with an underage girl.
Each man arrived at the door of a modest house in a quiet Jefferson County neighborhood. There was a student teacher; there was a computer consultant who volunteered on a search- and-rescue team.
Another was an auto mechanic, and one was married with two kids.
Some arrived with condoms or marijuana. One came with a bag of rope.
All had one thing in common: the look of utter shock when SWAT officers and 9News TV cameras appeared out of nowhere.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” a wide-eyed suspect pleaded with officers who held him face down. “This is so horrible. I wasn’t expecting anything, I swear.”
In March, eight area law-enforcement agencies coordinated an elaborate sting operation – prompted by 9News – to lure potential sex offenders from an Internet chat room to a living room where police waited to pounce.
The operation involved sheriff agencies from Jefferson, Arapahoe and Adams counties; Denver, Lakewood and Littleton police; the Colorado Bureau of Investigation; and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office.
In the end, 14 men were in custody charged with enticement of a child and attempted sexual assault of a child. None was a registered sex offender.
“It didn’t really surprise me that these guys didn’t have records of this before, because these type of offenders fly quite a bit under the radar,” Arapahoe Sheriff Grayson Robinson said. “The fact of the matter is that they will be prosecuted, they will have sex offenses on their record and every one of them will be required to register as a sex offender.”
Investigators were contacted that weekend by more than 100 men who didn’t come to the door.
“We caught 14 in one weekend, and the truth of it is we could have taken down a lot more,” said Jefferson County District Attorney Scott Storey. “Even with all our resources together, it wasn’t enough.”
Storey added that parents need to help out.
“Parents need to wake up, and kids need to be aware that there are still a lot more men like this out there,” he said.
To attract the men to the house, investigators sat at computer terminals and assumed the identity of a 14-year-old girl whose parents were away for the weekend.
The questions over an Internet chat began innocently enough: “What’s your a/s/l (age/sex/location)?”
In every chat, the suspect was informed of the girl’s age.
In a chat with one suspect identified as Crawford Rainwater III, 34, of Westminster, an investigator identifying himself as a teenager named “Jesse” and utilizing the username “got_milk2314” was asked almost immediately to verify “a/s/l.”
After identifying Jesse as a 14-year-old girl alone at home for the weekend, “bad_karma_0,” whom authorities identify as Rainwater, replied: “male” and “a bit older, 34.”
The chat initially revolved around interests and hobbies but eventually moved to the subject of sex.
Almost 30 minutes into the chat, bad_karma_0 would point out, “technically, you are jail bait unfortunately. … Going to get me into any trouble if we were to meet?”
The investigator replied, “No way r u gonna get me in truble … cuz my mom wuld kill me.”
Bad_karma_0’s reply: “No one can know … be like it never happened. Us meeting.”
When each suspect arrived at the home, a female deputy looking far younger than her age waited for him at the door.
Not all suspects made it to the door – some were caught just outside the house, and one tried to run but didn’t get far.
As the suspects stepped inside, the first thing that caught their attention were TV lights, but by then SWAT officers sprung from a doorway.
To disorient them, another female officer playing the role of the girl’s mother stood over the men yelling at them: “Pervert, what are you doing with my daughter?”
A dozen of them admitted to investigators that they came to have sexual contact with whom they believed to be a 14-year-old girl.
Rainwater, a volunteer for Summit County Rescue Group, told investigators that he came intending to talk the girl out of it.
Timothy Hansen, a 33-year- old auto-parts salesman, told investigators he too only came to “counsel” the girl. He said he planned to pick her up and “scare her by driving his car really fast.”
Gary Benton White, 29, who is married with two children, was the only one to apologize.
“I am truly sorry for what I have done, and all I can wish is that I can turn back time,” White said.
The operation involved six weeks of planning and dozens of officers from several agencies.
There are no formal plans to create a regional task force to go after Internet predators. But while this was the first multi- agency sting operation of its kind in the area, it probably won’t be the last.
“It just makes the process more efficient, because these things require a lot of resources that not every agency can muster up on its own,” Robinson said. “I think you can be assured that you will see a very coordinated effort in the future.”
Staff writer Manny Gonzales can be reached at 303-820-1537 or mgonzales@denverpost.com.
