Missing girl found in Ohio

A missing 15-year-old Sacramento girl has been found in Ohio, where she was lured to the home of a 39-year-old man through an Internet chat room. Richard Marshall of Massillon, Ohio, was arrested on suspicion of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, soliciting a minor and pandering obscenity over the Internet.

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Source SacBee.com

Man allegedly met Sacramento teen on Web

A missing 15-year-old Sacramento girl has been found in Ohio, where she was lured to the home of a 39-year-old man through an Internet chat room, authorities said.
Richard Marshall of Massillon, Ohio, was arrested Thursday night on suspicion of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, soliciting a minor and pandering obscenity over the Internet. He was booked into Stark County Jail in lieu of a $100,000 bond, Massillon police officials said.

Federal charges are expected to be filed against Marshall next week in Ohio, said Sacramento FBI agent Karen Ernst.
The girl's parents have gone to Ohio to get their daughter, who is in the care of child protective services, Ernst said.

The investigation is in its early stages but authorities believe the case exemplifies what happens daily on the Internet.

Because of the Web's impersonal nature, it is difficult to gather statistics on how many young people are being targeted by sexual predators, said Gregory Fong, the supervising special FBI agent in charge of the Sacramento Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement Team. However, he said, the number of contacts is probably in the tens of thousands.

Fong's office, which serves most of Northern California, gets a case almost every day of a child or teenager having contact with a sexual predator over the Internet. Northern California has about 45,000 of California's 90,000 registered sexual offenders, and the north state area is particularly active for Internet predators, Fong said.

"The Internet is the wild, wild West of today," Fong said. "It opens kids up to all kinds of people feeding on them."

The targets are frequently girls age 13 to 15. Predators meet them in Internet chat rooms and "groom" them through "electronic flirting," Fong said.

In the case of the 15-year-old from Sacramento, authorities believe she had been chatting on the Internet for "quite some time" with several individuals.

"I truly believe that her parents did what they could, but because of the openness of the Internet she was able to continue conversations with several individuals," Fong said.

The girl left her home on foot about 1:30 p.m. Jan. 4. Ohio authorities say the suspect arranged for the girl to travel about 2,400 miles to Ohio on a bus. FBI officials have not confirmed how she got across the country, Fong said.

The parents notified the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department the day she disappeared. The Bee is no longer identifying the girl because she may be the victim of an assault.

After interviewing friends and learning of the girl's computer use, the Sheriff's Department contacted the FBI task force to assist with locating her, said Sgt. R.L. Davis, Sacramento County sheriff's spokesman.

Within 24 hours, the FBI had located the girl at the home in Massillon, Fong said.

Ten years ago, the first thing authorities would grab was a missing girl's diary, Fong said. Today, the first thing they look at is a computer.