SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — Desiree Navin moved with her two young children to a home on Sioux City's west side earlier this year.
Her girls, Joeyanna, 7, and Jayceelynn, 5, were preparing to attend the nearby Liberty Elementary School this fall until she took them on a walk to a park near the school at 1623 Rebecca St.
"I saw him sitting there relaxing with his dog over by the school, and I thought, 'He looks familiar,'" she said.
As the man got closer to her, Navin remembered, "Yep I know him, he's a pedophile."
Navin said she had heard the man, whom she had known since she was a teenager, was a sex offender. To verify her suspicions, she visited the Iowa Sex Offender Registry Website, where she learned the man was on the registry and his address was less than 250 steps from the school. The Sioux City Journal (http://bit.ly/2eDJToo ) reports that the registry showed he was convicted in 2003 in Iowa of lascivious acts with a child between the ages of 14 and 17 and in a neighboring state of a sexual charge against a minor.
"You ain't going to school there," Navin said she told her children that same day.
To her dismay, she later learned from a Journal reporter that the man was within his legal rights to live there.
The landmark 1995 Iowa law that established the sex offender registry originally prohibited nearly all convicted offenders who victimized children from residing within 2,000 feet of a school or registered day care -- the length of about six football fields. But changes approved seven years ago by then-Gov. Chet Culver and the state Legislature relaxed the restrictions for offenders convicted of less serious sexual crimes against minors, like the man Navin and her children encountered. ..Continued.. by ALEX BOISJOLIE Sioux City Journal
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