Police are investigating whether transient Duane Morrison may have found Platte Canyon High School hostage victims on MySpace.com, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said Monday.
But there’s one thing Suthers said he’s sure of: With 70 million subscribers to the social-networking website, including millions of teens, many online predators are lurking. Suthers spoke at a training session led by Microsoft Corp. to teach police and school officials to better fight online predators.
“I’m still waiting for some confirmation on Morrison,” Suthers said. “(But) I find parents and grandparents are scared about the safety of their children on the Internet.”
Police still are not clear about why Morrison, 53, took six teenage girls hostage at Platte Canyon High in Bailey on Wednesday before fatally shooting 16- year-old Emily Keyes and turning the gun on himself.
A student told police that Morrison asked him about the identities of a list of students before going into the school.
“Our task is to stay on top of the technology,” Suthers said. “These predators aren’t dumb.”
Yahoo news groups, along with MySpace and Microsoft Network, are popular with both computer users and criminals, said Cmdr. Dave Pettinari, who works at the high-tech-crimes unit in the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office.
All such sites emphasize spots where users can communicate with one another.
But it’s not just social-networking sites where danger lurks, Pettinari said.
“There are thousands of places you can instant message,” Pettinari said. “It’s like we’re bailing a bathtub with a thimble.”
Children ages 12 to 16 are most at risk from online criminals because they’re generally naive, curious and technically savvy, said Adam Romine, who works in the sex-crimes unit of the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Before the Internet soared in popularity, sex criminals used to spend a lot of time face-to-face with potential victims, “breaking down barriers,” Romine said.
“(The Internet) has made it a lot easier. They can work on six different victims at one time,” Romine said.
At the seminar, police learned more about how to investigate websites, domain names, Internet-protocol addresses, e-mail messages, chat and instant messages, and Internet/computer forensics.
