It took only 90 minutes for man to chat with ’13-year-old girl’
and set up an encounter
– with Gilroy Police
Gilroy – A Morgan Hill man thinking he was meeting a 13-year-old girl he first met on Myspace.com was arrested by Gilroy police Wednesday morning at Christmas Hill Park.
Mark Muhn, 20, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to commit lewd acts with a child younger than 14. He appeared stunned when officers arrived at 8:50am instead of the girl he thought he met online the night before. Detectives confiscated a roll of Trojan condoms from him and discovered a bottle of Smirnoff vodka in his car.
Detective Mitch Madruga created a profile on the Web site just days earlier, posing as an Ascencion Solorsano Middle School student, when Muhn contacted his Internet alias at 5pm Tuesday, police said. For 90 minutes the two chatted and Muhn proposed the two meet the next day and go back to either his home in Morgan Hill or her house in Gilroy.
“About an hour and half later and all was said and done, which just goes to show how easy it is,” Madruga said. “I probably have over 200 messages in my inbox that I haven’t even dealt with from people in Fresno, Fremont, Oakland … This is a real live danger. This is not just a story in the newspaper.”
Police went to his 1695 W. Edmundsen Ave. home later Wednesday to collect his computer for forensic analysis to see if he has contacted other young women, or if there are other real-life victims out there.
“I kind of wanted to get in there and show the public how easy it is. I haven’t contacted anybody. They’ve always contacted me. All I did was post a junior high school profile and it went downhill from there.”
Madruga has caught three other men in the past 20 months for soliciting sex from children, however, Muhn was the first that solicited him using Myspace.com alone.
“He kept saying he wanted to do things. I kept saying, “what?” I told him to bring protection, so he brought rubbers,” he said. “I wanted to do a strictly Myspace (case).”
For Madruga, the idea came after a 13-year-old Gilroy teen ran away from home April 17 to meet a 20-something man in Nevada she met on Myspace. She was recovered safely in Nevada by police.
“Last week when I read that I thought, ‘I’m doing a Myspace,'” he said. “One of the scary things about Myspace – you’ve got these really young girls – 13, 14, 15, 16 – putting real explicit photographs up and you have these 20-something guys these girls are willing to party with.”
Madruga’s profile has a photograph of a young girl dressed suggestively in a short skirt and belly-showing T-shirt.
“It’s nothing that these other kids aren’t putting on – it’s milder,” he said.
And Muhn was just one of several adult men to contact Madruga’s alias. The majority of the 500 hits his teen profile received were from men claiming to be in their 20s.
“I kind of played the woe is me angle and they sucked it up, which is sad,” he said.
Madruga’s profile stated that he was a former cheerleader.
“The fantasies just went from there with these guys,” he said.
Myspace prohibits individuals younger than 14 from joining, however, teens can lie about their age to create a profile. Most middle school students with Myspace accounts have done this to create their page.
Madruga scrolled through dozens of photographs underage girls post of themselves on the site. Many are in their underwear, many are naked except for a black mark drawn in to cover the private parts – most are clearly younger than 18 – and admit it in their profiles.
Statistics from a 1999 Department of Justice study indicate that one in every five children aged 10 to 17 are solicited online for sex. Madruga believes that figure is grossly outdated.
“I think the number is 100 percent,” he said. “One-hundred percent of my profiles have been solicited (by predators.) They search for me, they hunt me.”
In just two months Myspace.com has grown by 20 million users worldwide. As of Wednesday night, there were more than 75,573,750 users, with virtually little online policing.
Madruga believes parents need to get up to speed with their children’s online habits to protect them.
“Parents need to wake up, because there are still a lot of kids in Gilroy running amuck on Myspace,” he said.
