LandfallVoyages

While we were hanging out in Ensenada, we became friendly with a neighbor who, honestly—gave off kind of weird vibes from the moment we met him. A couple of other families with kids also got a strange feeling about him and independent of each other, we all came to the conclusion that he was likely a child molester. And given the kind of attention he was paying to our kids, one who totally had a thing for young boys. It was only after talking to another mother that we decided to check online and sure enough, there he was just a plain as anything–a twice convicted child molester with a taste for little boys.

The first time he went to prison, he must have discovered that prison wasn’t so bad after all. He met some super cool guys there who had a lot in common with him. They had such good times in prison, that after they got out, they all met up down in Los Angeles and set up a nifty club for guys like them. Their child molestation ring specialized in young runaway and at-risk boys and our neighbor used to brag to his special friends that he never had a victim who’d talk.

I know this because the cops busted up that ring and sent his ass back to prison for 60 years, since he was the ringleader and all. But for a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, he’d still be there today. He likes to make it sound like he was a bigshot lawyer or a paralegal in this firm that specialized in defending people on trial for child molestation. He wasn’t. His big glory story is about how this one time he got a child molester off who was going to die in prison before he got out, all because he didn’t have regular clothes to wear at his trial. On appeal, some dipshit judge decided that yes, Chester the Molester may not have gotten as fair of a trial in a prison jumpsuit as he might have gotten wearing street clothes. 7 years into that 60 year sentence, they opened the doors and let him out. He tells this story with pride all the time and it’s true. The only thing he leaves out it that he was representing himself and Chester turns out to be him.

Over the last couple of weeks, Eli became fast friends with another boy in the marina and as the boys walked from our boat to the other boat, they had to walk past Chester’s boat which damn near drove him crazy. Every day he’d do everything he could think of to insinuate himself into our boys’ lives. He may just as well have tattooed, “I want to have sex with your kid.” on his forehead, it was that obvious. It got so bad I had to have a little chat with him and remind him that society frowns upon that kind of deviant behavior.

That didn’t go over very well and of course, he denied everything and said look me up on Megan’s Law and I’m not there so I didn’t do anything because if you get busted you’re on there for life and I was all–no you’re not, says so right on the website and anyhow they’ve got your bust and your cases and your freaking mug shot online somewhere else that isn’t required to remove that information after some lowlife successfully petitions to have that stuff removed from the Megan’s Law website. And then I told him, nice as could be, that we understood something was broken in him and it was hard to do the right thing and we were helping him by watching him all the time and he should not for one minute think that he was going to get away with molesting any of the kids in the marina. Then he called me some very unflattering names that ought not be repeated in polite company and I may have told him to go fuck himself and then Steve went and had a talk with him and boy oh boy did that calm his butt down. I thought he was going to crap himself.

Anyhoo, it caused a big flap in the marina, with some folks of the opinion that we should’ve handled the whole thing more discretely and others were of a mind that we were altogether too kindly to the fellow. He went and poured his heart out to a friend and admitted to everything and said all about how he was going to get him some help and was powerful contrite and it wasn’t 24 hours later he got busted sneaking another underage boy from town onto his boat after dark.

I bring this up because when my father-in-law Ken came to visit, he expressed concern about Eli going up to the showers by himself. I pretty much blew him off and made the point that Eli’s 15 and can take care of himself and even on the off chance that we had any molesters in the marina, no one would be terminally stupid enough to try anything with a kid in a public shower. I mean, everybody’s got their own stalls and stuff. Really. Pshaw.

Score one for Grandpa. As it turns out, Chester didn’t bother my kid in the showers, but there was an incident in the past where he was caught trying to be inappropriate with someone else’s kid in the showers up there. Those guys are long gone, so I can’t ask them about it but still…creepifying, no? The point is, as parents, we need to pay attention when someone trips our alarm bells. We did initially look Chester up on the Megan’s Law website, but he’s not on there anymore, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided we might be getting paranoid in our old age. Another parent dug deeper and found him on Offendex.com. We googled his name and found enough additional disturbing information to make us move the boat off that dock immediately. Even though we were planning to leave in a couple of days anyway.