San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Nonprofit confronts suspected pedophiles
Colorado volunteer group targets three men in San Antonio
Thomas Fellows and his team from Colorado came to San Antonio recently looking for pedophiles.
They aren’t police officers. One is a photographer. Another is a mother with a part-time cleaning job. They and other volunteers help Fellows look for suspected child predators. They’re driven by a belief that police and district attorneys either don’t take the problem seriously enough or don’t have the necessary resources.
The Bexar County District Attorney’s Office wasn’t pleased to learn of their presence here and said in a statement, “We strongly discourage citizens from taking these matters into their own hand.”
Fellows and his associates were undeterred, and during a four-day visit to San Antonio, they confronted three men they believe are threats to children, based on undercover operations in which the group used online decoys posing as kids.
Fellows’ group, the nonprofit Colorado Ped Patrol, encourages its targets to seek counseling before it calls the police. During the group’s recent “mission” in San Antonio, members summoned police to the home of one suspected predator and gave officers evidence they had collected on that man and two others. No arrests were made.
Fellows, 39, who owns a window washing business in Denver, founded the nonprofit in May. He and his volunteers search for child predators online. The group said it doesn’t initiate contact; its decoys wait for men to reveal their bad intentions.
Ped Patrol preserves online chat logs as evidence. When it confronts suspected predators, it livestreams the encounters on its YouTube channel. The nonprofit is supported entirely by donations.
“We are not about violence,” Fellows said. “We do not want these guys getting hurt. We want them to get help or go to jail for what they’ve done.”
One of the group’s stops in San Antonio was an apartment complex on the North Side.
A man who lived there allegedly had propositioned a Ped Patrol volunteer posing as a 13-yearold.
While corresponding online with the “girl,” the man had displayed a stash of guns and counterfeit money. He claimed
to have killed before and asked the “girl” whether she would do anything for him, including killing his wife, according to Ped Patrol’s chat logs.
‘Like an intervention’
The decoy was Celeste Hilton, 34, a Ped Patrol volunteer and stay-at-home mother of four.
Hilton said she was victimized by a predator when she was 12. The man lured, groomed, assaulted and abused her over several years, she said. When confronting predators, she shares aloud memories of her trauma.
“I don’t mind telling predators my thoughts. They need to know,” Hilton said. “It’s like an intervention.”
The San Antonio man began communicating with her online in May.
After verifying his identity, Hilton arranged to meet him at a downtown hotel for what he apparently believed would be a sexual liaison with a 13-year-old.
The man canceled the rendezvous, however, saying he was out of town. So the Ped Patrol team of four, plus three local supporters, went to his North Side apartment in a two-story complex with a gated pool and canopy-shaded parking with numbered spots.
A woman who identified herself as his wife answered the door. The man was lying on a sectional sofa in the dimly lit apartment. He claimed to be ill and on morphine.
Fellows livestreamed the entire encounter on YouTube, methodically describing the evidence from the chat log. He encouraged the man to seek counseling. The man refused.
Fellows shared jokes with viewers and periodically thanked people who were donating money — mostly in $5 and $10 amounts — via Youtube.
Finally, the team called police.
The responding officers interviewed the man but did not make an arrest.
They told Fellows they had confiscated the man’s phone and that the department’s vice unit would take it from there.
Fellows was disappointed.
“There’s so many kids here. It’s a big apartment complex,” he said.
The mission begins
For Fellows, Ped Patrol’s mission is personal. His son was molested almost eight years ago by his former brother-in-law.
Fellows’ anger grew when he learned that his son’s assailant was to receive a six-year prison term. He said he fought for a longer sentence.
The perpetrator, Shaun Gonyea, ultimately was sentenced to 20 years for sexual misconduct with a minor, according to the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
“It motivated me to do something like this,” Fellows said.
Initially, his goal was to get people into therapy, which he proposed to the first 40 or so people he confronted, he said.
“I thought, ‘Maybe we can get help and they can be fixed,’ ” Fellows said. “I did a lot of research and eventually found out that they can’t be fixed because a lot of ’em don’t want to be.”
Of that initial group of people, he said, two agreed to seek therapy and send him weekly updates about their recovery — both are on their 12th step. Still, he keeps evidence on them in case they backslide.
Fellows began calling police more often after an officer asked: “Who are you to say who goes to jail or not?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know who should be in jail and who should not,’ ” Fellows said.
Operation San Antonio
Many of the people Ped Patrol confronts are willing to talk with Fellows and his supporters. Others stay quiet and run.
Both scenarios unfolded during the visit to San Antonio.
One man, who identified himself to Ped Patrol as a private music teacher in Bexar and Wilson counties, allegedly had arranged a liaison with a decoy at a downtown hotel. When the four-person crew confronted him near the Bexar County Courthouse, the man talked about bringing his wife’s sex toy to his planned meetup, and he revealed that he had child pornography.
He called his wife and told her what he was doing at the hotel before heading home.
Authorities take notice
In another incident, the team confronted a man who had told a Ped Patrol decoy that he wanted to inject a 13-year-old girl with methamphetamine.
The team confronted the suspect downtown as he walked to what he thought would be a meetup with a teenage girl.
He refused to answer their questions, ran to his vehicle and drove away.
Fellows said he gave San Antonio police Ped Patrol’s evidence on both men.
The Bexar County District Attorney’s Office visited Fellows’ hotel while he was in San Antonio, but he wasn’t there.
Fellows said officials later asked him to stop confronting suspects and said they would handle any further encounters his group had arranged.
Fellows said that when Ped Patrol has tried to work through law enforcement rather than conduct its own investigations, an arrest typically is not made for six to eight months.
They worry that the alleged pedophiles will find other victims in the meantime.
“That could be 10, 30 people,” Fellows said.
The District Attorney’s Office said it takes seriously the crimes that Ped Patrol pursues and “works closely with legitimate law enforcement agencies.”
The office cited a case this month in which it assisted the Texas Attorney General’s Office and Olmos Park Police in an operation that led to seven arrests on suspicion of online solicitation of a minor.
“I do want to change the way police do this,” Fellows said. “It takes time. They watch our cases. They build a little rapport with us. … At least they (SAPD) did spend a lot time out here.”
Charlotte Berry, 25, one of the three local supporters who accompanied Fellows to the North Side apartment complex, said she hoped his brief presence in San Antonio would push law enforcement to focus more on child predators.
“I saw some of the live catches that he had already done, and I’ve been hooked ever since,” her husband, Nathan Berry, said of Fellows. “Just to see his mission of what he’s really trying to do, I’ve been supportive 100 percent.”