sstanton@sacbee.com
If only they’d read his file.
Phillip Garrido reported to California parole authorities on June 8, 1999, fresh from being released by federal parole authorities.
He was a convicted rapist and kidnapper on lifetime parole out of Nevada, and had been charged but never tried in another case involving the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. He had been returned to prison for four weeks for a 1993 marijuana violation, and he had been a regular drug abuser.
All this information was contained in Garrido’s federal parole file, and should have been used by California corrections officials to determine that he was a high-risk sex offender.
But no one read Garrido’s federal file at the time, and that led to an astonishing series of failures to discover that he had been hiding Jaycee Lee Dugard in his Antioch-area home for years, concludes a new state report released Wednesday.
The report from state Inspector General David R. Shaw, conducted after critical media reports and public outcry over the Dugard case, concludes that California’s parole operations have “systemic problems that transcend parolee Garrido’s case and jeopardize public safety.”
“From our perspective, profound mistakes were made,” McGregor Scott, the Sacramento attorney guiding Dugard and her family through her reorientation into society, said Wednesday.
But that barely begins to describe the extent of the missed opportunities to find Dugard earlier, Shaw’s report says.
Parole agents never talked to Garrido’s neighbors or checked in with local law enforcement. They ignored hundreds of instances when his GPS tracking device malfunctioned.
They never enforced a rule that he remain within a 25-mile radius of his house, and they allowed him regularly to skip drug testing.
Out of the 123 months California agents supervised Garrido, they did so properly for only 12 of those months, Shaw found.
RANDY PENCH / rpench@sacbee.com
Inspector General David Shaw points to a chart of Phillip Garrido’s movements tracked by a GPS device. Tracking was spotty, Shaw said.
California corrections Secretary Matthew Cate appeared with Shaw on Wednesday and conceded there had been problems with Garrido’s supervision.
“We agree that serious errors were made over the last 10 years,” Cate said, adding that numerous reforms are being made to the parole system.
He said he could not discuss whether anyone faced disciplinary action.
Dugard had been kidnapped in 1991 from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood. She was 11 at the time, and authorities say Garrido kept her as a prisoner in his backyard, raping her and fathering two daughters with her.
She was kidnapped three years after Garrido was released from prison, and for the first eight years of her captivity, federal officials had responsibility for supervising Garrido.
After he was released from federal parole, Nevada officials kept him on lifetime parole status because of a 1977 rape conviction out of Reno. But they allowed California parole to supervise him because he was living with his mother near Antioch.
Shaw found that when Garrido reported to California parole authorities that day in June 1999, he objected to remaining on parole and insisted he should not have to be supervised.
According to the report, he was not supervised at all until November 1999, when he was classified as a low-level offender.
His only contact with state parole agents between then and May 2000 were some phone calls, three office visits and five written reports that Garrido submitted.
From then on, his contacts with California parole agents were irregular and limited.
For the 10-year period California supervised him up until his arrest in August, agents visited his home only 60 times, with 40 of those visits coming in the past two years. Corrections officials have said a paroled sex offender typically might merit three to four visits a month.
No agents visited Garrido’s home between June 2001 and July 2002. Only one visit was made between June 2004 and August 2005.
Four different times – November 1999, July 2004, December 2005 and April 2008 – California parole officials recommended to Nevada that Garrido be released from parole, Shaw found in his investigation. Nevada refused.
During the 60 home visits, none of the six parole agents who supervised Garrido over the years noticed the electrical lines running from the Garrido house into the backyard and through the back fence to a shed hidden behind the fence.
California parole agents did not realize Garrido’s property extended beyond the fence into a large hidden compound where he allegedly kept Dugard because they had not read his federal file, which included a diagram of the entire property, Shaw found.
Even when supervision of Garrido tightened over the last two years, agents missed critical clues. On June 17, 2008, his parole agent went to the home and found a 12-year-old girl there.
Garrido told the agent the girl was his brother’s daughter. Authorities now believe she was Dugard’s older daughter.
Parole supervisors skipped required reviews of Garrido’s case 10 times, and an additional 15 times “completed case reviews but failed to identify and correct obvious deficiencies in the manner parole agents handled Garrido’s case,” the inspector general found.
Even after Garrido was placed on GPS supervision in April 2008, parole agents barely monitored his whereabouts, Shaw found.
Because he had mistakenly been classified as a low-risk offender, he was on “passive” GPS, meaning agents did not follow his movements in real time but could tell where he had gone.
He was told to get permission to go more than 25 miles from his home, but he routinely did so without consequence.
From April 2008 until July 2009, Garrido’s GPS device alerted parole agents 335 times that its signal was not working for long periods.
“This was almost a nightly occurrence,” Shaw’s report states. “System records show that parole agents ignored 276 of these alerts altogether.”
Once, when the device sent an alert that indicated the strap that connected it to Garrido’s ankle may have come undone, his agent took no action, Shaw found.
There were other basic failures, as well.
Parole agents never talked to Garrido’s neighbors, some of whom had expressed concerns about his odd behavior. One neighbor told Shaw’s investigators he met Jaycee early on, something the report says could have been learned by vigilant parole agents “to further investigate Garrido and perhaps discover Jaycee.”
“The neighbor described a conversation he had in the summer of 1991 – when he was about 8 years old – with a young blond girl through the chicken wire fence that used to separate his yard from Garrido’s,” the report says. “He said that the girl told him her name was Jaycee and she lived there.
“The neighbor reported that as he was talking to Jaycee, Garrido came out and took her into the house. Soon thereafter, Garrido built an eight-foot privacy fence that separated their yards.”
Source: SacBee
I was simple stating that I think we all need to look out for each other. Yes, a neighbor reported Garrido in 2006 — 2006, nowhere near the time she was taken. If more came forward to report he was with children and were DILIGENT about it (when law enforcement obviously wasn’t), maybe things would have turned out better.
By: lfabris on November 6, 2009
at 3:01 pm
Ifabris:
I disagree. “We” did not fail in this case. This was gross negligence and utter incompetence on the part of CDCR, who even had the gall to boast shorty after Garrido’s arrest.
Garrido was reported to local law enforcement for suspicious behavior in the past. This has already been documented. He violated his conditions of parole multiple times, but remained free.
Do you have some personal or financial interest in advertising the Facebook app? Such applications bring out the ignorant vigilantes who rush to grab the pitchforks and torches while failing to understand specifics.
One good place to start with mass failure is voters who put idiot ‘tough on crime’ politicians in office, and subsequently pass poorly written measures which become law and cost taxpayers millions of dollars with no good results. Are you listening George Runner and Dan Lundgren???????
It doesn’t matter how many laws, codes, registries, or parole agents there are, those responsible for monitoring Garrido FAILED.
As an aside, a registered sex offender can be anyone from someone who urinated in an alley behind a bar to a 20 year old who received oral sex from his 17 year old girlfriend to a monster like Garrido. That is how poorly the current laws are written (Megan’s Law and Jessica’s Law).
Someone paroled for manslaughter, domestic violence, armed robbery, drug dealing, you name it, can move anywhere they wish and you don’t know it.
The issue with true sick minded people such as Garrido is a perfect example of how society thinks subjectively and with emotions, rather than using smart and well thought decisions to guide their choices. People voted these tax feeders into office, voted for ridiculous laws which cost millions of dollars in more cops, court personnel, jails, judges, and prison guards, and you still get a guy who kidnaps a young girl and can hide her right under their nose for 18 years.
As I stated earlier, the number of laws and ‘registries,’ codes, etc. do not amount to a nickel if the agencies responsible are not doing the right job the right way.
By: Jacob on November 5, 2009
at 10:07 pm
I think we all failed jaycee. If more of garrido’s associates/neighbors knew about his offender status, would the sheriff have rec’d more complaints and could she have been found sooner. Honestly, we have to watch out for each other. I read in this article that you can now track offenders through Facebook….and we could almost guarantee many of his associates are on facebook daily. http://www.lawfirms.com/facebook-sex-offender-apps.html
By: lfabris on November 5, 2009
at 7:08 pm