How's this for the weirdest sentence you'll read all day? A set of teen burglars is a California town's new heroes! Weird, yes. But they just got a pedophile off the street. Anyone who has the chutzpah to walk into a police department and admit, "I broke into So-and-So's place, and I'm here to tell you because the dude's got a place full of kiddie porn" deserves a little break on the whole "criminals are the scourge of society" shtick.
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.
So far the kids aren't being charged, although it's up to the DA. Do you think they should get a break?
Image via downhilldom1984/Flickr
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Comments 72
they still should be put in jail. i mean they DID break into someones house.
The authorities make deals all the time with people who perpetrate lesser offenses in order to get at people who are committing greater offenses. And if the suspect was arrested, there is obviously some sort of proof that the pornography belonged to him, like perhaps he was IN the movies himself. Otherwise the authorities would be unlikely to touch it. Better in this instance to reinforce the good behavior of these teens rather than punish the bad. As for the possibility of the pornography being of "pubescent" vs. "prepubescent", I would think that teenagers viewing other teenagers doing sexual things would not qualify as "molestation" in their minds unless there was obvious force involved. Less likely for them to take the discs to the police. However, teens seeing young children in a pornographic setting is much more likely to disgust and alarm them, resulting in a decision of "this is wrong, we have to do something about this". Which, thankfully, they did. This was an interesting story. Anonymous, it takes an extremely special kind of person to put themselves in the shoes of a sex offender. A friend of mine is a parole officer and does therapy groups with convicted sex offenders, even to the extent of being on suicide watch for them. It is certainly not a job that I could do, but perhaps it would be a vocation that you would excel at.
I read some other articles on this story, apparently the suspect in this case reported the property stolen, and when questioned about it, ADMITTED to the images on the CD's. So this wasn't exactly a case where the police are just picking on some poor guy that liked to look at provocative teenagers. The police actually qualified it as "kiddie porn". I think that in this particular case, we should be grateful that the teens that stepped forward with this evidence were altruistic enough that they were willing to take responsibility for their actions in order to remove a predator of children.
It doesn't matter how many times they fudged up in the past, these kids did a good thng. They came forward, admitted to their own bad behavior in order to bring someone much worse to justice. That is honorable no matter how you look at it. Good for them!