To Catch a Predator host who traps sex perverts in TV stings 'caught cheating on his wife'... by hidden cameras

6-29-2011 National:

He's made his name with a controversial show that catches would-be internet sex perverts in televised stings.

But now Chris Hansen has found himself on the receiving end of his own hidden camera tactics, after the married NBC anchor was secretly filmed on an illicit date with a blonde television reporter 20 years his junior.

Hansen, 51, has allegedly been having an affair with Kristyn Caddell, a 30-year-old Florida journalist, for the last four months.

Last weekend he was recorded taking Miss Caddell on a romantic dinner at the exclusive Ritz-Carlton hotel in Manalapan, before spending the night at her Palm Beach apartment.

Hansen, who has two young sons, was caught in an undercover sting operation arranged by the National Enquirer.

Secret cameras filmed the couple as they arrived at the hotel for dinner and then drove back to her apartment - where the pair left, carrying luggage, at 8am the following day.

Hansen lives in Connecticut with his wife Mary, 53, but he has been spending more and more time in South Florida investigating the disappearance of James 'Jimmy T' Trindade - and allegedly sleeping with Miss Caddell. ..For the rest of the story.. by Fiona Roberts

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The real cultural predators

5-28-2009 National:

Controversy finally canceled Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator” series. Although it wasn’t the only program to profit from the sordid world of sexual abuse, it was the first to transform audiences’ strange fascination with sexual crimes into a commodity.

To produce the show, Dateline NBC paid the controversial citizens’ organization Perverted-Justice.com, which recruits volunteers to pose as underage Internet users to lure online predators to pursue sexual liaisons. Dateline producers funded the organization, which then staged confrontations between the predators and reporter Chris Hansen, who grilled them before their arrests.

Although Dateline producers marketed the program as an investigation, which reports the news as it currently exists, they were, in fact, helping to produce the news themselves by spearheading antipredator initiatives alongside Perverted-Justice.

There lies one of the show’s significant moral blemishes: A journalist’s responsibility is to report the news, not create it and then cover it.

NBC News executives have staunchly defended the series. It is true that they were ultimately helping to take harmful sexual predators off the street. Yet no matter how noble the work of these journalists might have been, pursuing this end at the expense of sound practices sets a dangerous journalistic precedent and gives their work a certain dishonesty. Perhaps that’s why, despite the show’s graphic element of realness and the detail in which it explored the obscene world of online solicitation, it still had a manufactured and disingenuous feel.

In strangely voyeuristic fashion, NBC’s hidden cameras captured the utter humiliation of men whose lives were being ruined on national television. The show’s genius, purely from a marketing perspective, was that it managed to combine the veneer of a serious investigative report with the manufactured drama of planned confrontations. It’s this combination of artificiality and realism, of specious journalism and reality show candidness that gave the show its popular formula. That’s why Dateline could re-create the same scenario during a four-year period without ever showing something really new. That and, well, people were willing to watch.

After all, as easy as it is to slam NBC for driving up its profit at the expense of honest, respectable journalism, consumers ultimately bought in. Dateline smartly pilloried one of the most universally abhorred and easily condemnable crimes. It seems scapegoating is a clever marketing strategy.

Such marketing strategies are incredibly cynical though. The underlying assumption is that viewers are so desperate for someone on which to blame society’s ills and perversions that they will faithfully watch a television show that does just that.

The sad reality, of course, is that the strategy worked. And when critics finally created a stir about the ethicality of the show, network execs argued that the ends justified the means. Their implication is that ratings come before principled journalism. Cultivate within viewers a sense of moral outrage, the thinking goes, and the ratings will take care of themselves, no matter how artificial the journalism is.

I’m just sorry there’s not more social outrage to go around. ..News Source.. by Christian Hines | IDS

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The Online Predator Scare

4-1-2009 National:

Profiting from the panic

There is money to be made from fear—and business has been good for those hawking the online child predator threat.

Exploiters of the scare range from the Internet-policing groups who ferret out suspects and share information with authorities (and sometimes, for a fee, with journalists) to vendors of software intended to help parents monitor and restrict web use. Some of the biggest beneficiaries are TV companies that feature salacious segments on how predators stalk the web in hopes of arranging live liaisons with their young prey. Of course, it’s all in the spirit of public service and protecting the children, right?

CNN says so: “It’s a scary reality. Your children are vulnerable to predators online,” remarked CNN’s Gerri Willis (7/28/07), reporting on “the need to increase awareness of online predators.”

And Bill O’Reilly (Fox News, 10/4/07) says it’s a big problem, too: “Every day we’re seeing kids molested, murdered, kidnapped because they are meeting people on the Net and then they go meet them in person. And that’s just insane.”

The threat has been the subject of any number of television news magazine segments (ABC’s Nightline, 9/25/08; CBS’s Early Show, 11/22/07), as well as the Fox broadcast network’s America’s Most Wanted (8/8/09, 1/3/09, 2/6/09).

But it’s an NBC show that gets the top award for ceaseless flogging of the theme.

If you wanted to watch something besides football last Superbowl Sunday, you could tune into MSNBC’s “Predator Bowl”—12 hours of wall-to-wall episodes of NBC Dateline’s popular (if critically scorched) To Catch a Predator. The show features men who have talked dirty on the Internet with actors posing as minors. The men are lured by the actors to supposed live liaisons, where Dateline anchor Chris Hansen grills them about their motives and reads their smutty letters back to them—and, voyeuristically, to the viewers. Each episode ends with the subject being tackled by waiting police.

The show was always a mess from the point of journalism. It created news rather than reporting it, it surrendered its independence by working hand-in-glove with police agencies, and it paid sources. (NBC paid hundreds of thousand of dollars to the online policing group Perverted Justice for information and help in setting up stings.) Moreover, the show’s week-in and week-out pounding on the same theme suggested it had less to do with journalism and public service than with pandering for ratings through salacious exploitation.

But appeals to journalism ethics left NBC News executives unmoved until one of the show’s stings resulted in the suicide of a target: a former Texas prosecutor who had allegedly engaged in online sexual conversations with one of Dateline’s “minors.” When the subject failed to show at the arranged rendezvous/sting, he was tracked by police and NBC to his home. As they arrived, he shot himself to death (New York Times, 6/26/08).

In addition to the suicide, for which NBC paid an out-of-court settlement, there were embarrassing reports that many of the “cases” in which Dateline had been involved had been thrown out of court, reportedly because NBC’s and Perverted Justice’s involvement interfered with proper police evidence-gathering procedures (20/20, 9/7/07; AP, 6/28/07).

This was finally enough to get NBC News to cancel production of the show in December 2008—but not quite enough to get them to stop airing it. Since its cancellation, Predator has lived on in perpetual reruns on NBC’s cable outlet MSNBC, with the “Predator Bowl” merely the program’s most prominent recent showcase.

To Catch a Predator might be dismissed as just a sleazy scramble for ratings, but its producers claim to be motivated by a genuine journalistic concern. Predator host Chris Hansen says the threat is “an epidemic” (Dateline, 12/23/06), that “the scope of the problem is immense” (MSNBC.com, 11/3/05) and it “seems to be getting worse” (Dateline, 12/16/05). On his MSNBC blog, the anchor claimed that “one in five children online is solicited for sex by an adult” (2/6/06) and “at any given time, 50,000 predators are on the Internet prowling for children” (11/3/05).

This would all seem highly newsworthy, not to mention alarming. But the fact is that researchers reject these claims—and with them the show’s journalistic premise.

According to a new report from Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies, 12/31/08), while online solicitation of children by adult strangers does exist, it is a much smaller threat than Hansen and others have claimed.

The researchers, examining existing research, found that roughly 1 percent of minors were threatened by online advances from adult strangers, and that the small cohort that were most threatened had home situations such as drug abuse or absent or disengaged parents that put them at higher risk in all aspects of their lives, online and off. The Harvard study concluded that minors were under greater risk from online harassment and bullying by their peers than from adult sexual “predators.”

So where did Hansen and others (e.g., ABC News, 5/3/06; CNN.com, 4/20/06) get the claims that “one in five” minors have been sexually solicited by adults online, or that “50,000 predators” are trolling the Internet right now?

In the first case, by distorting the findings of a 2000 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. That study, surveying 1,501 minor Internet users (aged 10 to 17), found that 19 percent of them reported “at least one instance of unwanted sex talk (from other teenagers), or sex talk from an adult (whether wanted or not), in the past year.” Eighty-two percent of such contacts came from other minors, so the proportion of minors who had an online sexual episode with an adult was more like 1 in 30 than 1 in 5.

And the researchers were asking about contacts that fell short of actual sexual solicitation. What the researchers called “aggressive sexual solicitation” accounted for just 3 percent of overall contacts—but, since 66 percent of those approaches were by peers, the actual instance of minors who were aggressively sexually solicited by adults on the Internet was roughly 1 percent.

The survey did not turn up a single example of a minor who ended up meeting an adult for sexual purposes as a result of these online activities.

Harvard’s 2008 study clarified the point further:

Other peers and young adults account for 90 percent–94 percent of solicitations in which approximate age is known. Also, many acts of solicitation online are harassing or teasing communications that are not designed to seduce youth into offline sexual encounters; 69 percent of solicitations involve no attempt at offline contact. Misperception of these findings perpetuates myths that distract the public from solving the actual problems youth face.

And the “50,000 predators” figure? In a thorough report on the predator scare and the media’s role in it (9/06), Skeptical Inquirer magazine’s Benjamin Radford explained how the NBC anchor more or less concocted the number, which had been repeated in influential circles:

As it turns out, Attorney General [Alberto] Gonzales had taken his 50,000 Web predator statistic not from any government study or report, but from NBC’s Dateline TV show. Dateline, in turn, had broadcast the number several times without checking its accuracy. In an interview on NPR’s On the Media program [5/26/06], Hansen admitted that he had no source for the statistic, and stated that “it was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number.”

Radford concluded that the predator scare fits the definition of a “moral panic,” a sociological term “describing a social reaction to a false or exaggerated threat to social values by moral deviants.” The evidence certainly suggests that the online child predator scare would fit comfortably alongside such other greatly exaggerated or concocted threats as the Salem Witch Trials, the Satanic ritual murder scare and the crack baby epidemic (Extra!, 9–10/98). But in this case, the panic is not just being driven by outrage over an alleged threat to the moral order, but by the profit motives of an industry directly exploiting the scare. ..News Source.. by Steve Rendall

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CA- 'Dateline' sex case may be headed for trial

8-20-2008 California:

Judge set to announce whether there's enough evidence against man held in Petaluma sting

One of the nearly 30 criminal cases stemming from a televised "sex predator sting" in Petaluma two years ago may be headed toward trial with a crucial court ruling expected this week.

Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Ken Gnoss is set to announce Friday whether prosecutors have put on enough evidence to order an Oakland man to face trial on felony attempted child molestation charges.

Chandrashekhar Nunna, 33, has argued through his attorney that he didn't intend to have sex with the 13-year-old girl he arranged online to meet at an east Petaluma house on Aug. 26, 2006.

The "girl" was really a decoy working with a self-professed online vigilante group known as Perverted Justice, whose workers say they arrange sex liaisons with adults who come on to them as they pose as minors in Internet chat rooms.

Shortly after Nunna arrived at the house following nine days of chatting with the decoy online #150; sometimes about sex #150; he was confronted by a "Dateline NBC" TV reporter and, moments later, police, who arrested him.

Nunna's arrest, along with those of 28 other men, was shown on national TV as part of the news show's "To Catch a Predator" series. "Dateline" aired two hours of the Petaluma sting, paying Perverted Justice $140,000 for its part, according to court testimony.

NBC rented the house and provided all the video equipment to Petaluma Police, who allowed "Dateline's" Chris Hansen to interview the men -- who sometimes apparently assumed he was a cop -- before officers swooped in and arrested them.

Nunna, who at the time of his arrest was listed as a software engineer, has pleaded not guilty and is free on bail. If convicted, he could face a four-year maximum prison term and be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

At the first day of Nunna's preliminary hearing Friday, his attorney, Steve Spiegelman, suggested his client simply planned on bringing the young girl a Starbucks coffee drink when he showed up at the Castle Drive house, and may have wanted to warn her that what she was doing could be dangerous.

Prosecutor Juliette Olson introduced 45 pages of transcripts of Yahoo instant-message chats that she said shows Nunna planned a sexual encounter with the girl, who told him she was a virgin.

Within 25 minutes of online chatting, Nunna allegedly asks her if she's "ever been intimate with a guy."

"You know if I hang out with you and someone finds out, I will go to jail. I will be called a pedophile," Nunna allegedly wrote her a half-hour later, according to the transcripts.

Later, though, Spiegelman pointed out, Nunna said he couldn't have sex with her because it was wrong and that she should find someone closer to her own age.

Spiegelman planned on showing Gnoss a videotape of Nunna arriving at the house and audio of a phone call from another decoy guiding Nunna into the garage. He said the tapes show Nunna's intentions weren't criminal.

Of the other 28 men arrested during the three-day sting, 19 have been convicted of either felony or misdemeanor attempted child-molestation charges, most through negotiated pleas.

One man was sentenced to three years in prison because he had a prior, similar conviction. The others received three-year probation terms, some with additional jail time. They were all required to register as sex offenders with the state.

Eight other cases are pending trials.

One man, a U.S. Marine from Camp Pendleton, was turned over to federal authorities last year to face a maximum of 86 years in military prison if convicted. ..News Source.. by L.A. CARTER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

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FL- Attorney: Dateline sex sting evidence obtained illegally

6-28-2008 Florida:

BUNNELL -- Evidence against a fired Alabama police officer arrested in the Dateline NBC sex sting in Flagler Beach should be thrown out because his privacy was violated for financial gain, his attorney argued in court Friday.

But Todd Spikes and others arrested in the sting were not entitled to privacy, Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Carlson countered Friday in Flagler circuit court.

"The defendants don't have any expectation of privacy when they are trolling for little children online and talking to them," Carlson said.

Spikes, 43, of DeFuniak Springs in North Florida was fired from his job as a Florala, Ala., police officer after he was arrested in December 2006 as part of a Dateline NBC "To Catch a Predator" sting. Police found handguns, an assault rifle and a shotgun -- all loaded -- in his sport utility vehicle. In court Friday with Spikes, was Daniel Kelly, who was 45 and from Clearwater when he was arrested during the sting.

In all, police arrested 21 men who had sexually explicit online chats with decoys posing as children and then drove to a house in Flagler Beach to meet the decoys, investigators said.

Spikes, sporting a blondish soul patch and mustache and wearing a blue blazer, sat in court Friday, sometimes leaning back in his seat as his attorney argued. Kelly, clean-shaven and wearing a tan suit, sat nearby, his hands sometimes clasped together or pressed against his face.

Spikes is charged with attempted lewd or lascivious battery, lewd or lascivious exhibition and computer pornography and child exploitation. Kelly is charged with attempted lewd or lascivious battery and computer pornography and child exploitation.

Besides arguing that evidence should be thrown out, Spikes' and Kelly's attorney, Patrick D. Hinchey, said the charges should be dropped because there was no actual child in the sex sting. The decoy investigators said Spikes and Kelly were chatting with was an adult over 18 years of age, the motion states. Hinchey wrote in the motion that there is nothing criminal about communicating with someone over 18.

Hinchey also argued that information such as the chat logs should be thrown out because they were obtained fraudulently and without a warrant.

He said the police worked through a third party, Perverted Justice, to get the evidence, and violated the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Perverted Justice is a controversial activist group.

"The procurement of information was through fraud with intent to use it for commercial purposes," Hinchey said. His motion states that third parties were paid more than $100,000 to provide electronic communication to NBC. That's a felony under Florida law, the motion states.

"I frankly don't know why we don't have criminal charges filed through the false procurement of this information," Hinchey said.

But Carlson argued that police joining forces with Perverted Justice and NBC did not constitute fraud against Spikes and Kelly.

"Law enforcement is not defrauding them," she said. "It's called an undercover investigation."

And the fact that there was no actual child did not matter, Carlson said.

Circuit Judge Kim C. Hammond said he would review the arguments and issue a ruling. ..News Source.. by FRANK FERNANDEZ, Staff Writer

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GA- 'To Catch a Predator'

5-25-2008 Michigan:

Man caught on NBC television show seeking a new trial

BERRIEN COUNTY — A Berrien County man convicted of attempting to entice a child for indecent purposes and attempted child molestation, after he was caught on Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, via the Internet, has filed a motion for a new trial.

After being found guilty by a jury in Harris County Superior Court last November, 37-year-old Marvin Harrison Smith II has requested a new trial under grounds that the verdict was reached contrary to law, contrary to evidence and strongly against the weight of evidence. Smith has obtained new legal representation since the 2007 trial and is taking several steps to see that his conviction is overturned.


To Catch a Predator

If you’ve ever seen the To Catch a Predator series, then you know the purpose of the show is to identify potential sexual predators who have made contact via Internet with children or people they believe to be children for sexual conversation and/or activity. The cases, reported by Dateline Reporter Chris Hansen, are investigated as part of a sting operation with the assistance of local law enforcement agencies in a particular area and the Perverted-Justice Foundation, Inc., an organization known for investigating and identifying online sexual predators.

According to information found on msnbc.com, decoys from Perverted-Justice build profiles as minors in online communities, enter different chat-rooms and wait for people to send them messages. If and when the decoys are contacted by adults, they engage in conversation while investigators collect evidence that includes adult pornography, child pornography or sexually explicit chat.

The alleged offenders are invited to a house used in the sting operation and usually arrange a time when they believe the decoy will be home alone to visit. If and when the potential predators arrive at and enter the residence, they usually encounter Hansen, who conducts a brief interview before the suspects are taken into custody by law enforcement and charged.

While many viewers feel that the work done on the series is commendable, several viewers feel that the method used is a ploy to lure people into traps, according to comments posted on the Dateline web site’s feedback page.

Smith’s Arrest and Conviction

Smith, an Alapaha native, was arrested in 2006 during a four and a half day sting operation in Fortson, along with 19 other men. The operation was organized, in part, by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

Hansen’s live blog about the apprehension of Smith reads:

“Then there’s 35-year-old Marvin Smith. For the better part of a week he chatted with a decoy posing as a 15-year-old girl. It was absolutely one of the most graphic chats I’ve seen in all of the investigations so far. He details what he wants to do to the girl. He introduces the decoy to a woman he says is his girlfriend and suggests three way sex. He even brags that he has had sex with another 15-year-old girl. Smith, who online goes by the screen name Swgamaleyess, has been saying all week that he’s going to show up at our house. Time after time he stands us up.

We started to think that he was getting satisfaction from the chat and wouldn’t really come over. Finally, on the last day of our investigation he pulls into our driveway and walks into our kitchen with hidden cameras rolling. He asks our decoy for a hug and when he starts to follow her into the next room he sees one of our cameramen and bolts. Smith doesn’t get very far. What happens next is a first for us. When Smith tries to run from the deputies, he’s shot by a Taser and knocked to the ground. It’s not until he’s questioned by detectives that we learn Smith also has a religious side saying he used to be a Baptist minister.”

The video of Smith’s arrest also revealed that he was married at the time.

Smith went to court in November 2007 on allegations of attempted child molestation, attempt to entice a child and obstruction. He was originally supposed to be tried in Harris County; however, the venue of the trial was changed to Dalton County.

Smith was found guilty Nov. 7, 2007. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison and 12 years probation.

Smith’s Appeal and Family’s Argument

Following the conviction, Smith began to work on his appeal. A motion for a new trial was filed and Smith obtained a new lawyer, Attorney Linnie Darden of Jones, Osteen and Jones in Hinesville.

In Darden’s opinion, Smith was never given fair treatment after he was arrested. He argues that Smith’s previous attorney did not handle the case in an effective manner and failed to defend Smith to the best of his ability. In addition, Darden contends that the prosecution failed to prove that the messages sent to the decoy actually came from Smith, particularly since the username could not be linked to him.

Darden also criticizes the procedure used by Perverted-Justice to secure sexual predators, comparing it to a form of entrapment.

“Because the decoy was not, in fact, 15, then there were no actual minors in this case,” Darden said. “Most of it is make believe. Therefore, one can’t accuse someone of being the real deal if the person on the other end is posing as someone she is not. What we have is a man who has never shown any kind of pedophilic behavior in the past and is now unjustly being labeled a predator.”

Additionally, Darden questions whether Smith received a fair trial since he was tried in Dalton County rather than Harris County.

“The demographics in Dalton County were not at all similar to those of the county in which the alleged crime was committed,” Darden said. “Also, there were no black jurors on the panel and only one black person in the jury pool.”

One of Darden’s final arguments is that Smith received more prison time than any of the other men convicted as a result of the sting operation. The average sentence of the others arrested was two to six years imprisonment, with some to be released as early as this year.

Smith’s family has been protesting against his imprisonment since he was convicted. In December, his parents, Pastor Marvin H. Smith, Sr. and Minister Earnestine Smith sent the following letter to several community leaders and officials in Berrien County and other parts of the state:

“On behalf of a mother and father, we cry out for justice for our son. This past year has been the most difficult in our lives. In July 2006, the world bared witness to our son and several other men who arrived at a house for Dateline’s show, To Catch a Predator. The images portrayed were of heartless criminals that prey on the minds of innocent children. But we, the families left behind in the wake of this madness, want to share the true character and integrity that Perverted-Justice and the media failed to mention. For our son, Marvin, and many others, this was the first offense committed for any reason. His criminal background was perfect except for this one occurrence, where that seemed not to have mattered to the justice system.

He has lived a productive life in society, working full-time as a restaurant manager for a well-known establishment. He also served in the United States Navy as a dental technician stationed aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington, where he received numerous awards of prestigious honor. Marvin is a family man, a mentor to others, a brother, a neighbor, co-worker and friend. For Marvin, he had no choice in his fate. Unlike for many congressmen and senators, he was not given the chance at rehabilitation. There are many different rehabilitation support centers across the globe that address individual need for alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, addiction, obesity, kleptomaniacs, smoking and hoarders. How is it that America proclaims to be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave where there is Equality and Justice for All; however there is no justice for Marvin and many others in his situation?”

In addition to the letter, Smith’s parents and sister, Michelle Baker, organized a rally in Alapaha for Smith’s supporters, which was held last month. More than 100 people, which included family, friends and colleagues, assembled at the rally.

Smith’s conviction and sentence is the hardest for his mother, Earnestine.

“We have murderers who don’t get the type of treatment my son has gotten,” Earnestine said. “Because he wanted to fight for his freedom, they made him pay by giving him the maximum sentence, while the other men captured received much less punishment. Now he sits in a maximum security prison with murderers and repeat offenders, while the others are in prisons with less dangerous environments.”

“There were 20 men in the operation, but they chose to pick on my son. My son is a college graduate and a decent man. He is not a criminal.”

Smith’s mother added that he was not the aggressor during the online conversations. She stated that the decoy harassed Smith via phone when he did not show up for a scheduled date and left several messages on Smith’s family phone, with no regard for Smith’s wife.

“Everyone is entitled to fair treatment by the justice system,” Earnestine said. “My son did not receive that treatment.”


Harris County Sheriff’s Account

Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley continues to support the court’s decision to convict Smith. After learning of Smith’s intent to appeal, the sheriff replied, “I don’t understand why he would. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers. It was a solid case and I feel good about the verdict that was reached.”

Jolley added that Smith received more time than any of the others caught in the sting because he had an additional charge and the nature of his chat logs were more extreme. In addition, Jolley stated that an IP address was used to trace the messages sent to the decoy to a computer in Smith’s residence.

In response to the argument that there were no actual minors in the case, Jolley argued, “That’s why he was charged with attempt to entice a child. If it had been a minor, he would have been charged with enticing a child. However, we would never put a minor in that position.”

Jolley closed by disputing the defense’s claims of entrapment.

“Just like when we use undercover police officers to bust drug dealers, the people used in this operation were decoys,” Jolley said “It’s a common method used in law enforcement and it’s a preferred one.”


What Next?

According to Darden, he and Smith are still in the preliminary stages of the appeal process. While the motion for new trial has been filed, the next step, a hearing, has been delayed while they await a transcript. In the meantime, Darden is gathering additional materials for a strong defense and compiling character witnesses to speak on Smith’s behalf.

The family also continues to share Smith’s story with people in and around their community. Baker stated that the previous rally was an icebreaker to introduce the public to the situation. She and her parents are in the process of organizing a second rally.

Phone and e-mail messages to Dateline NBC regarding Smith’s case were not returned. ..News Source.. by Malynda Fulton, The Valdosta Daily Times

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