Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Special Enforcement Officers conducted their yearly Operation Safe Halloween and found a Santa Clarita sex offender living with children, officials said Friday.
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In Santa Clarita, officers arrested 22-year-old sex offender Leonardo Rosales, who was residing with his mother.
Rosales was arrested at 24015 Copper Hill Drive in Valencia, according a Probation Department official.
“We place a probation hold so that there’s no releasing (Rosales) on his own recognizance until the court hears the matter,” said Eric Newby, with the Los Angeles County Probation Department.
County officials were still looking into the specifics behind the charge, he added.
The SEO team learned that the mother runs what appeared to be a child day care service out of her home.
A female tenant who also lived in the residence with her infant son and 9-year old daughter told SEO she had no idea the man was a convicted sex offender.
Rosales is being held without bail.
Officials did not release the name of the day care center.
When the Special Enforcement Officers set out in the pre-dawn hours of Halloween, they were looking to see if 66 of the Department’s highest risk child predators are in compliance with their court orders ranging from no child porn, computers, phones, to candy or costumes in their homes used to entice children on a day famous for temptation.
Also on Friday morning:
In a Pomona home, the SEO team entered to find the 32-year old sex offender living with a ten -year old girl, who was found in an adjacent bedroom with another adult male.
The probationer was arrested for a probation violation and the other adult male was arrested on two unrelated, outstanding warrants. Another women in the house, believed to be the mother of the girl, was arrested on suspicion of child endangerment.
The child was taken into protective custody by the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The SEO team also confiscated a methamphetamine pipe and marijuana. The contraband was taken to the Pomona Police Department for processing.
Sixty Los Angeles County Special Enforcement Officers (SEO) deployed from eight staging areas Countywide at Five A.M. with a pre-dawn strategy to check on child sex offenders at a time when offenders least expect to be visited by law enforcement.
“Operation Safe Halloween is about ensuring probationers are in compliance with the law, but at its core, the Operation is about protecting children and we were able to accomplish that mission today,” says Assistant Chief Margarita Perez.
In total, five sex offenders were arrested and taken into custody, five computers, 13 USB sticks and memory cards, three computer towers, marijuana and a methamphetamine pipe were confiscated.
The Department of Children and Family Services has taken one 10-year-old girl into protective custody and is investigating the status of 2 other children involved in the home where a sex offender resided.
“Today is a perfect example of the value of going into the communities, into the homes of probationers to see who they are living with, what is their environment, and what is the real story of their compliance with the orders of the court,” says Special Enforcement Director, Eric Newby.
This is the third year LA County Probation has conducted Operation Safe Halloween.
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If Operation Safe Halloween is so successful this one night of the year, how about just calling it Operation Safe and do it more often throughout the year?!?!?!?!
Kudos to Eric Newby, Margarita Perez, and the whole SEO for excellent work.
Wonder what the headline for this story would have been if the sex offender had been in Canyon Country instead of Valencia?