Aurora – A former city parks employee who’s charged with meeting a teenaged boy at a city-run children’s event and later assaulting him had been identified twice by Aurora police as a registered sexual offender from Oklahoma.
However, Jermaine Vaden, 29, wasn’t asked to register in Colorado as required by law.
City officials say they hired Vaden to work as a seasonal parks employee with no knowledge of his criminal past. No background check was required. The city only conducted criminal checks on people who worked closely with the public or handled money.
That policy has been changed. All city employees and volunteers will now face criminal background checks, according to Kin Shuman, human-resources director.
The Aurora Police Department now will change its policy, requiring officers to inform the department’s sexual-offender unit anytime they have contact with a registered sexual offender.
The first time police learned of Vaden’s past was April 29 when his stepmother called police to her Aurora home to report she had been in an altercation with Vaden. The officer ran his name and discovered he was a registered sex offender from Oklahoma. Vaden wasn’t at the home and the officer didn’t return to make him register in Aurora, which requires sex offenders who relocate to the city to register within five days.
The second time came May 12, when Vaden reported being a victim of a strong-arm robbery when his gym bag was stolen. Police arrested two people for that offense. Vaden’s name was run again, and again police saw that he was a registered sex offender from Oklahoma. He told police that he worked at a clothing store, not revealing that he was a city employee, Police Chief Daniel Oates said.
The next time police encountered Vaden was because he was a suspect in the attack on the 15-year-old boy. Police say he met the boy while he was working as a city parks employee at the annual KidSpree event. He attacked the boy the next day at his home, police say. Vaden faces formal filing of charges Monday in 18th Judicial District Court.
Police arrested Vaden after the boy reported the crime July 18 on charges that he didn’t register as a sexual offender in a timely manner. Several days later the boy was able to identify Vaden as his attacker and the courts increased his bail to $500,000.
“As a result of our discovery, all further cases in which an officer in the course of police work comes in contact with a known sexual offender, the sex crime unit will do a follow-up,” Oates said.
Shuman said had the city known that Vaden was a registered sex offender who served a nine-year prison sentence for assaulting two boys, he may have not been hired.
“It would have sent our antenna up,” Shuman said. “We would have sat down with the city attorney’s office and made a determination on whether we could hire this person or not.”
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer may be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
