“We’re saying enough is enough,” community leader Morris Grifton said.

Grifton was outside Miramonte Elementary School in South Gate, California, around 7 a.m. with other residents concerned about how students are being treated in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“We want cameras in the classrooms, in the hallways and around the school,” Grifton said.

Two teachers at the school were arrested last week. One is accused of taking bondage photos of more than two dozen students in his classroom, and the other is accused of lewd acts on children.

Tom Waldman, a spokesman for the district, said Miramonte will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday “to take a break.”

Waldman said both days will be “pupil free days,” but he did not say whether staffers will be in the building.

Although school was open Monday, many students were kept away by parents who were participating in the morning rally. Some of the parents planned to spend several hours outside the school to wait for a meeting scheduled for later in the day with school officials.

“We feel it’s time for officials to get out and start showing what they’re made of,” said Pedro Baez, the political director for the L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable. “This type of situation should not be allowed to be continued to go on,” he said.

In addition to adding cameras, Grifton said some rules regarding teacher personnel files needed to change.

Now, information in those files are held for 60 days. Grifton said he believes the information should be held for at least a year.

“They’re keeping it from the public,” he said. “Whether it’s insufficient for not, we want to have access to it.”

Baez, who carried a sign that read “protect our children,” agreed that there needs to be more transparency and urged local leaders to consider making changes.

He also thanked the pharmacy clerk who called police after seeing the disturbing photos.

“If it hadn’t been for him, who knows how many other victims may have fallen prey,” Baez said.

Teacher Mark Berndt, 61, is accused of taking the bondage photos, some showing suspected semen-filled spoons at the children’s mouths, authorities said.

The investigation into Berndt began in October 2010, when a CVS drugstore photo technician in Los Angeles County’s South Bay area told the Redondo Police Department about finding the images of blindfolded children in a processing order, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Scott said.

The case was turned over to the sheriff’s office, and after an initial investigation, investigators notified school authorities, who removed Berndt from his classroom in January 2011.

About 400 photographs collected by investigators show children blindfolded, with tape over their mouths, Scott said. At least 23 children in the images have been identified, while another 10 are unidentified, he said.

Some photos show female students with “what appeared to be a blue plastic spoon, filled with an unknown clear/white liquid substance, up to their mouths as if they were going to ingest the substance,” authorities said.

On Friday, a second teacher — Martin Bernard Springer, 49 — was arrested for allegedly fondling two young girls in the classroom.

Capt. Mike Parker of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said Springer’s arrest is “quite different” from Berndt’s.

Aside from the two teachers being assigned to the same school, “I’m not aware of any connection” between them, he said.

Berndt, a 30-year teaching veteran, is being held on $23 million bail: $1 million for each of the 23 counts he faces of lewd acts on a child.

On Friday, about 15 angry parents gathered outside the school, complaining that administrators failed to apprise them of the investigation into the second teacher.

One mother, Isadora Arrellano, said she would transfer her 5-year-old deaf son to another school at the end of the academic year.

“Right now, I’m really worried for my kid,” Arrellano said.

“I leave my son and I go home and I don’t know what’s going to happen to him,” she added. “He’s deaf, so he cannot speak, so that’s why I’m worried. I’ve lost all trust in this school.”

Source: CNN

Yes, Ledezma freely admitted that in August 2008 he raped, sodomized and got forced oral copulation from a 6-year-old girl when he was 20 years old.

But he thinks that he should have been allowed to plead guilty and then have some time–a few weeks or months?–to contemplate the consequences and then change his mind.Though he acknowledged in open court what he’d done, Ledezma believes he was rushed into pleading guilty and didn’t have adequate time to think about the consequences.

“I had no priors or any crime history,” he told a panel of California Court of Appeal justices in Santa Ana. “I always follow the rules.”

The prosecutor wanted Ledezma to serve a 50 years to life sentence, but Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals gave him a term of 25 years to life because he pleaded guilty prior to a jury trial.

After he pleaded guilty and got sentenced, he changed his mind.

“It was too much time [in prison]” he wrote to the appellate justices.

But Justice Kathleen O’Leary opined that Ledezma should feel lucky. He faced a potential prison term of 75 years to life.

“Based on Ledezma’s admission of guilt, which allowed the victim to avoid testifying at trial, the court imposed a significantly reduced sentenced,” O’Leary wrote in her opinion. “There is nothing in the record to suggest this sentence was either inappropriate or illegal.”

Case closed.

Source: OC Weekly

The story goes that the teens were up to no good when they broke into the barn of 54-year-old Kraig Stockard. They grabbed what they thought were 50 blank CDs and took off for parts unknown. But then they put them into a computer and found a whole load of really naughty, dirty, filthy sicko stuff.

Now here’s where it gets good. They took them straight to the cops, and Stockard is facing a raft of child pornography possession charges.

Good for the kids!

It may not seem like much, but we’re talking about teenagers here. They could have just said, “Man! Gross!” smashed the CDs, and moved on. In fact, I seem to remember enjoying smashing things a lot more when I was that age (and I didn’t think about having to clean up all the pieces). Instead they faced up to doing something really wrong in order to achieve a greater good.

They got a pervert who hurts kids off the streets. Because even if all Stockard was doing was sitting at his own home filling up computers and discs with these images, he was part of the system that creates demand for these images. The higher the demand, the more kids are abused and forced to appear in these images. It’s a sick cycle, and two teenagers who started the day as the kind of losers who would break into a barn to steal CDs ended it as heroes.

Source: The Stir

APSAC is a national organization of health-care providers and law-enforcement professionals dedicated to supporting the health and safety of children and decreasing risk of maltreatment. This award is given to one individual each year who demonstrates leadership and achievement related to child maltreatment.

Urquiza’s efforts have resulted in the establishment of child-abuse treatment programs in more than 125 agencies, which provide treatment to more than 10,000 children per week.

Urquiza received the award in recognition of his contributions and leadership in the field of child maltreatment for the last three decades. In addition, he has been a leader in improving the quality of mental-health services to children by training mental-health providers in evidence-based interventions throughout California, the United States and in several other countries.

UC Davis Medical Center is a comprehensive academic medical center where clinical practice, teaching and research converge to advance human health. Centers of excellence include the National Cancer Institute-designated UC Davis Cancer Center; the region’s only level 1 pediatric and adult trauma centers; the UC Davis MIND Institute, devoted to finding treatments and cures for neurodevelopmental disorders; and the UC Davis Children’s Hospital.

The medical center serves a 33-county, 65,000-square-mile area that stretches north to the Oregon border and east to Nevada. It further extends its reach through the award-winning telemedicine program, which gives remote, medically underserved communities throughout California unprecedented access to specialty and subspecialty care. For more information, visit medicalcenter.ucdavis.edu.

Source: Media Newswire

“This is ridiculous,” Caroline Mason, of Canyon Country, said Wednesday. “We are so done with not being informed about this guy living around our kids.”

In the spring of 2010, William Greggory Babb, 50, pleaded guilty in San Fernando Superior Court to one felony of contacting a minor with the intention of engaging in lewd or lascivious behavior.

On June 17, 2010, the 6-foot-1, 280-pound sex offender was put behind bars inside the California Institution for Men in Chino, at least 67 miles away from Canyon Country.

On Saturday, he was released from that prison. On Tuesday, he was spotted on Tumbleweed Way in Canyon Country, where one of his victims still resides.

“The state sent me a letter saying they would notify me in advance of his release so that we could prepare,” Mason said. “Then yesterday (Tuesday), I get frantic calls from neighbors that they spotted him on their street.

“My son is still a minor,” Mason said. “And (Babb) is not supposed to be near children.”

Luis Patino, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, confirmed that the department is required to notify the families of victims about their rights, including notification of release.

“We do need to call them to let them know that someone is going to be released,” Patino said. Patino said he could not verify the details regarding notification of Babb’s release as of press time.

Babb was arrested Feb. 27, 2010, after preying on church-going boys. He was kept at the North County Correctional Facility in Castaic with bail set at $750,000.

“He used churches, several in Santa Clarita, to befriend children to develop a strange relationship between a 49-year-old man and 13-, 14-, 15-year-old boys,” Los Angeles County Sheriff​‘s Detective Rich Simmons of the Santa Clarita Valley Station’s Special Victims Bureau was quoted as saying at the time of the arrest.

Babb was charged with 10 felony counts.

Church officials and parishioners of the North Oaks Church of Christ in Canyon County, where Babb befriended Mason’s son four years ago, were also shocked to learn of his return to the street Wednesday without having received official notification.

“The state did not contact us,” said Ray Davis, the church’s preacher. “It would have been nice.”

Davis said he understands the church may not be included in the state’s list of those required to receive notification, but he cannot understand why the family of the victims were not notified.

“We’re just glad we know about it now,” Davis said. “I was under the impression we would get some kind of formal notification and, at very least, that the family would have been notified — and they were not notified.”

Babb is listed as a registered sex offender on the Megan’s Law website maintained by the state’s Department of Justice.

The Megan’s Law website, which alerts the public about sex offenders, describes Babb’s conviction and his appearance but lists no current address for him or a photograph of him.

Source: The Signal

According to the report, the family of one of the girls–a 12 year-old–reported the incident to the Wat Dhammaram temple in 2000. The family was told that the monk would be returned to Thailand but it soon became known that the pedophile monk is still serving in Wat Buddhavipassana in Long Beach, California, where it is alleged that he still has access to young children.

The protesters were members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). They handed out fliers and held up signs and placards, one of which read: “Children molested at this temple.”

According to Barbara Blaine president of SNAP:

We hope this temple will make the protection of children their priority, not the protection of grown men who are supposed spiritual leaders who violate their trust and rape teenage girls…We want any other victims to know as painful as it is, it is safe to come forward. They no longer need to be kept in secrecy and shame.

Shortly after the protest at Wat Dhammmaram, another group of protesters gathered outside the Wat Buddhavipassana temple in California. They were addressed by the head monk who promised to consult with the leadership of the temple in Chicago. The protesters distributed fliers to members and visitors at the temple. One of the protesters, Esther Miller, said:

We want families to know about a potentially dangerous predator who is assigned here at this temple…We’ve had a couple of parents march right in there with our fliers.

The Buddhist monk’s pedophile abuses became known publicly last year when another woman in Chicago area filed a law-suit alleging that the monk had been sexually assaulting her since she was 14. According to the woman, she became pregnant a year after the assault began.

But, according to the Chicago Tribune, the monk Boa-Ubol, reacting to the allegations against him, said that “he had contact” with the one of the girls “by accident,” but he denied having “accidental contact” with any other girl.

The head of the monks at Wat Dhammram, Boonshoo Sriburin, has explained that under the structure of the Theravada temples in the U.S., Boa-Ubol was free to continue as a monk. The head monk said that Boa-Ubol “chose” not to inform the temple in California about the allegations of child sex abuse against him in Chicago. The head monk said: “We have no authority to do anything… He has his own choice to live anywhere”.

Source: God Discussion

Michael William Snyder, 43, a San Clemente resident, allegedly rubbed the girl’s chest and stomach under her shirt “with a sexual intent” and sat her on his lap and put his hands up her skirt, the Orange County district attorney’s office said in a statement.

The girl’s mother became suspicious after her daughter did not want to be left alone with Snyder, according to the district attorney’s office. The mother contacted authorities.

Snyder calls himself “Mr. Mike” and is an author and illustrator, according to his website. He could not be reached Monday afternoon for comment.

He is charged with four felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and is free on $100,000 bail, authorities said. Snyder is scheduled to be arraigned April 8 at the Newport Beach courthouse.

Anyone with information is asked to call Investigator Lou Gutiérrez at (714) 347-8794

Source: Los Ángeles Times

The Associated Press – SANTA ANA, Calif.—A convicted pedophile who became the public face of Megan’s Law in the 1990s was denied his bid for release from a state mental facility on Thursday.An Orange County Superior Court jury determined Sid Landau, 69, was still a threat to society and should remain hospitalized in state custody, where he has been held for eight years.

Two previous juries deadlocked on whether Landau should be released.

Dressed in a blue-and-white checkered shirt, the gray-haired Landau looked down at the table, sighed and whispered to his lawyer, “I’m going to die in jail,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Prosecutors pursued a petition under the state’s sexually violent predator statute, which allows offenders deemed a continual threat to remain hospitalized in state custody after their prison sentences are completed.

Landau claimed he is not a threat because of his age and poor health, including prostate cancer and heart surgery. But prosecutors argued he is incurable.

Landau was convicted of molesting two boys in the 1980s but has admitted to abusing 10. He served a combined 10 years in prison on those convictions.

He became one of Southern California’s most recognizable pedophiles in the 1990s when police, who were enforcing Megan’s Law for the first time, distributed fliers in his Placentia neighborhood identifying him as a convicted sex offender.

He was chased from a series of homes and motels by death threats and protesters until he was arrested on parole violations in 1997.

He was transferred to a state mental hospital in 2000 following his second probation violation.

Megan’s Law was enacted in 1996 and allows police to publicize the whereabouts of sex offenders.