Web site plotting sex offender locations not always accurate

3-29-2010 Ohio:

Despite what a state Web site says, Collins Christian Children's Center does not have registered sex offenders living a football field's distance away on both sides.

Nor does a man who molested his 7-year-old daughter live within 1,000 feet of Firelands Presbyterian Day Care in Port Clinton.

In Norwalk, however, a man who performed oral sex on his 11-year-old nephew lives closer to a day-care provider than the Electronic Sex Offender Registration and Notification system, known as eSORN, would make it seem.

Register searches on the eSORN site, which allows the public to keep tabs on sex offenders in their neighborhoods, turned up at least 25 instances in which the system plotted the addresses of schools, day-care providers and sex offenders incorrectly.

In the case of Collins Christian Children's Center, the map placement is wrong for the church where it is housed and both offenders who supposedly live within the restricted radius. Instead, the nearest offender lives a quarter-mile away. A registered sex offender does live within 1,000 feet of Just Like Home Day Care and Learning Center in Huron Township, but both are more than a mile west of where eSORN says they are, on Cleveland Road West near Rye Beach Road.

Steeplechase Drive, a street where a sex offender recently lived near Shumaker Elementary in Bellevue, doesn't even appear on the eSORN map.

Law enforcement officials who deal with sex offender registrations say they're well aware of eSORN's accuracy issues, which seem especially prevalent in Norwalk and Clyde.

"There are some discrepancies in their pages," said Sandusky County Sheriff's Major Tom Fligor. "From what I hear, they're trying to update all those." ..Source.. SUSAN MCMILLAN