SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The parole agent in charge of supervising convicted rapist Phillip Garrido knew there was a 12-year-old girl inside his home but didn’t notice electrical wires that led into a compound where Garrido’s alleged kidnapping victim was being held, according to a report from the state Office of the Inspector General.

California’s corrections secretary apologized Wednesday for mistakes made in Garrido’s parole supervision, while the state police union deflected blame.

The moves came after a report from the state Office of the Inspector General said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation failed to “adequately classify and supervise” Garrido for several years.

Garrido and his wife, Nancy Garrido, are accused of the kidnapping and rape of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was abducted in Meyers in 1991. Authorities allege that Dugard was held in the Garridos’ Antioch back yard for many years. They also allege that Phillip Garrido fathered two children with Dugard. The Garridos, who are being held in El Dorado County, have both pleaded not guilty.

“We agree that serious errors were made over the last 10 years,” CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate told reporters at the Capitol in Sacramento. “We obviously deeply regret any error that could have possibly resulted in the victims living under these conditions for even one additional day.”

[Phillip Garrido's booking photo from a 1976 arrest in Nevada.]
Nevada Department Of Prisons
Phillip Garrido’s booking photo from a 1976 arrest in Nevada.

Inspector General David Shaw said corrections officials missed several clues in the Garrido case.

“The department often failed to follow its own procedures established to supervise dangerous sex offenders,” said Shaw, who said corrections officials didn’t supervise Garrido properly 90 percent of the time. “Furthermore, the department failed to utilize available tools, technology and information that could have potentially led to the discovery of Jaycee Dugard and her children.”

Shawn said parole officials made an initial mistake of classifying Garrido as a low-risk parolee. While Garrido was tracked via a global positioning system technology, agents often lost a signal from the device and then failed to follow up.

Shaw’s office recently conducted an independent investigation of Garrido’s parole supervision.

Among other findings in the report, the office said CDCR ignored opportunities to determine that Garrido was violating his parole.

Garrido was on federal and then state parole during the time he allegedly took Dugard from a bus stop and then held her for nearly two decades at his Bay Area home.

The two-month investigation was launched after questions surfaced about CDCR’s failure to find and rescue Dugard, 29, and her daughters sooner.

GARRIDO’S PAROLE
Garrido’s Federal Parole Documents
Inspector General Focuses On Garrido Case
Video: Source Says Parole Agent Didn’t Do Job
Video: DA Praises Garrido Parole Agent
Video: Who Was Supervising Phillip Garrido?
Video: Garrido Wore GPS Bracelet
Video: Parole Agent Praised In Dugard Discovery
GPS For Parolees Sparks Criticism

The report said that during the decade that the department was supposed to be keeping watch on Garrido, it failed to supervise him in several ways, including:

* Failure to obtain key information from federal parole authorities.
* Failure to properly supervise parole agents responsible for Garrido.
* Failure to use GPS information.
* Providing the public a false sense of security with a passive GPS monitoring program that falls short of its potential, raising OIG’s concerns about the department’s current and future uses of GPS monitoring.
* Ignored other opportunities to determine that Garrido was violating the terms of his parole.
* Failed to refer Garrido for mental health assessment.
* Failed to train parole agents to conduct parolee home visits.
* Missed opportunities to discover the existence of Garrido’s three victims, including failure to investigate clearly visible utility wires running from Garrido’s house toward the concealed compound, failure to investigate the presence of a 12-year old female during a home visit, failure to talk to neighbors or local public safety agencies and failure to act on information clearly showing Garrido had violated his parole terms.

In response to the summary, the CDCR said it’s proposing a new model for its agents:

* Increase supervision of parole agents by reducing the number of agents and parolees assigned to field supervisors.
* Assignment of field training officers to each of the four parole regions to provide hands-on training for new agents.
* New policies on use of GPS are currently being used in the pilot units and will go statewide before parole reform becomes law.
* Garrido “lessons learned” document already sent to agents in the field.

Shaw earlier said that in an initial screening of the Garrido case, it did not look like there was any criminal conduct by anyone from corrections.

The inspector general is responsible for independent oversight of corrections.

According to the CDCR, parole reform that becomes law in 2010 will reduce caseloads and will require agents to focus on “high-risk and serious offenders.”

Agent Saw Girl In Home

Shaw said a parole agent encountered a 12-year-old girl during a visit to Garrido’s home in 2008, but didn’t act.

“Garrido replied that the girl was his brother’s daughter,” the report said.

The report also said that red flags should have been raised when Garrido appeared on the UC Berkeley campus with two girls.

“The parole agent was aware that Garrido had in his presence two girls who referred to him as ‘daddy’ and to whom Garrido referred as his daughters,” the report said. “The parole agent’s suspicions should have been raised immediately since the agent believed Garrido had no young children.”

In the report, Dugard, who identified herself as “Alyssa,” said during an interrogation that she was from Minnesota and had been hiding for five years from an abusive husband.

“Alyssa” later identified herself as Dugard, the report said, and “confirmed that she had been kidnapped and raped by Garrido.”

Neighbor Janice Deitrick said she knew Garrido was raising two children.

“He was a friend. He told me he was raising two children. Two girls,” Deitrick said.

Full Interview: Phillip Craig Garrido

The neighbor said had she been informed by officials that Garrido was a sex offender and to report suspicious activity, she would have told them that he had children inside.

“If they would have told me, I would have talked to the FBI and got them out here, because it’s not right,” Deitrick said.

The inspector general’s report specifically highlighted that parole agents failed to talk to neighbors or local public safety agencies about Garrido.

Another neighbor, Richard Thomas, said, “I think they did screw up, big time.”

“No one ever knocked on my door,” Garrido’s neighbor, Rod Burns, said. “If I had been, I would have been clued in on things to look for.”

Electrical Wires ‘Never Noticed’

Dugard and her children allegedly lived in an encampment in the Garridos’ Antioch yard, and electrical lines supplied power to those structures.

According to the report, Garrido’s parole agent “said that he never noticed the utility wires running from the house toward the back yard or the electrical wire that came through a hole cut in the fence into the back yard and then extended to the rear of the property.”

[An electrical line hangs in Phillip and Nancy Garrido's back yard. View More Images]
An electrical line hangs in Phillip and Nancy Garrido’s back yard. View More Images

In addition, previous agents who performed searches of the home didn’t mention the wires either, even though they were visible from several places in the back yard.

“None of the parole agents documented in their notes that they ever noticed, investigated, or inquired about the wires,” the report said.

Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, deferred blame for the situation.

“We didn’t make the mistake. The federal government made the mistake. Nevada made the mistakes. They dumped him in California. We can only take measure of what we had when we had him and the knowledge that we had,” Corcoran said.

DA: Report Can Help Identify Problems

El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson said Wednesday that the report is welcomed as a way to find problems within federal and state corrections, and use those insights to implement changes and reforms.

“A more critical question which was has not yet been addressed is why a dangerous sexual predator like Phillip Garrido was released after serving only 11 years of a 50-year federal sentence and a 5-to-life Nevada State sentence,” Pierson said in a statement.

Earlier, Pierson praised the parole agent who supervised Garrido.

“We all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Pierson said in September.

SOURCE: http://www.ksbw.com/news/21530481/detail.html?taf=mty

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com.