When we saw a pervert was sending live videos of himself naked to our 14-year old daughter, we reported it to the local police. The police asked to see our daughter's computer so their forensic "expert" could examine it.
When they took the computer, they found, buried in the deleted files, thousands of images of young girls, mostly modeling shots, but some scarily explicit pictures.
We had purchased the computer from a used computer store. We had no idea that the previous owner had downloaded photos of young girls. We had never seen any of those files, they were deleted and only visible with FBI-style forensic tools.
Even though we willingly surrendered the computer, even though it's clear that a 14-year-old girl had neither the time or the inclination to look at photos of young girls, even though there was no way we could have ever seen these files, the DA's office charged our 14 year old with being a sexual predator.
Because of this, she was treated as a predator at school, not allowed to go to the bathroom without an escort, not allowed to participate in gym class, guilty until proven innocent, for almsot two years. During this entire time, the REAL predator, the one who had sent our 14-year-old naked pictures of his penis, the one who ADMITTED to the police that he was planning to have sex with her, was free to continue stalking other young girls.
Our daughter's case was finally dismissed, after we had to spend more than $25,000 on an attorney and our own forensic expert who showed that, had the police "expert" done his work properly, he would have realized that we had nothing to do with those pictures. Before dismissing the case, the DA tried to get us to cut a deal that would have forced our daughter to be on the national database of sex offenders. We, of course, refused because she was totally innocent.
Our daughter was traumatized TWICE: once by a predator, and then by the very police and DA who should have protected her.
We were bankrupted by the legal fees and ended up losing our home. The predator finally went to court a year after that and cut a deal, just probation. No jail time, no inconvenience to him. Meanwhile, we lost the computer (they wouldn't return it because it has... Pornography on it!), lost our savings, lost our home, and our daughter's mental health has never been the same.
After the case was resolved, I tried to contact the DA's office but they refused to take my calls.
There is much, much more to our story, but this is a very nutshell version of it. Our lives were destroyed because we "did the right thing" in trying to get a sexual predator off the streets. Life is NOT like the "To Catch a Predator" shows you see on TV. The cops never arrested the pervert. The DA was looking for the easy arrest and the headline, not the truth or justice.
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