I know this is an older story, the problem is – it never should have been allowed to happen. Never, never, never.
http://wtvr.com/...
In 1982, I worked at the Palm Springs Court. We had a traffic officer named, you guessed it, Randal Mason Young. (Note the one ‘l’ in Randal.) I knew Randy. I knew Randy fairly well and we actually had a casual relationship for a short time. He was nice, kind, very sympathetic to the fact that my fiancé (a fellow officer) had been murdered by a drunk driver. We never spent a lot of time together, so it wasn’t a surprise when we just stopped getting together. I’d still see him working downtown periodically and we’d chat sometimes, but that was it.
Flash forward about six/seven years later and I’m happily engaged; my soon to be and I are watching the local news one Friday night. I was surprised to see Randy’s picture on the news and even more stunned to hear the reason – he’d been arrested on federal child pornography charges. I felt sick. I was molested by more than one person as a child, I knew what any victim knows. I remember wanting to think this must be a mistake, but after a while, my gut told me no, this was truth.
I talked to some other friends within the department – some stood by Randy, said he didn’t do it, couldn’t have done it, it was a misunderstanding over evidence on a case that had been sent, etc., etc., etc. Others came out saying of course he did it, he was an ass, he never had anyone’s back, he always took the mall beat so he could watch the young high school girls, etc., etc., etc. Later, I would remember the last time I ran into him and how he kept looking at me like one does after seeing someone twenty years later. I realized that I had ‘aged out’ even though I was still in my mid-twenties.
I followed the case a bit, but it’s been ages and I can’t remember now whether he got three years of federal time or three years of probation, with a suspended sentence. Fairly certain it was three years of actual federal time and I believe he was convicted of possession of child pornography and transferring that over state lines to two or three addresses by mail; one in Virginia where he had property, and one in Indiana. I later heard that he sold his place here, but never cared to follow it up further. That is, until I stumbled across the article above.
So how did a convicted sex offender get a job driving a high school bus? Good question. I can’t find anything in the local news archives about his arrest, which was in either 1989 or 1990. There is nothing in the local court system searches either. So my guess, would be some idiot somewhere, after receiving the requisite application for expungement from the guy who knows how to play the system said, ‘oh, it’s not a violent sex crime with the touching and stuff, let’s expunge this one because he’s done his time’ and they went forth and expunged his record. Voila! Clean as a whistle and now able to work around unsuspecting kids and their trusting parents. How many girls between the mid-1990s when he got out and when he got caught in 2013?
Of course he pled not guilty. And of course there’s a plea deal.
“Per the terms of the agreement, Young was sentenced to three years with all three suspended, two years of supervised probation and he must register with the sex offender registry.”
http://www.dailyprogress.com/...
What happened to background checks? Oh, wait. There’s that expunged word again. Expunged like it never happened. Except it did. And now it’s happened again because a man who should have never been around children was able to get a sixteen year old girl to think she had a crush on him because he was allowed to drive her home everyday.
Here’s a clue on expunging things: peeing in public, probably safe to expunge. Wanking off in a porn theatre ala PeeWee Herman? Probably safe to expunge, although my inner jury is still on a case by case on that. Passing child pornography through state lines, might want to keep an eye on that – former decorated police officer and fireman be damned.
Sat Apr 18, 2015 at 1:23 AM PT: After a conversation today with a PI friend, Randy did serve Federal time for his offenses here in California. Getting this expunged would have cost a fortune, and possibly required a governors pardon.
So who overlooked this (or looked the other way) when doing his background check so he could drive a school bus full children?