Prowling for Predators

Gilroy detective sets sights on pedophiles in attempt to keep
children safe online
Gilroy – Minutes after entering a financial chatroom, Gilroy Detective Mitch Madruga’s 12-year-old alias was hit on by an Internet predator. After days of chatting with the 26-year-old, the detective set up a sting at Christmas Hill Park where the man was arrested last July.

What’s frightening is that there were 30 more Internet predators who nearly took the bait, but didn’t show for some reason or another.

“Personally, I think it’s getting worse. These guys are getting smarter, ” Madruga said. “I know they know the Internet better than the parents … Parents just aren’t up to speed.”

In the past 18 months, Madruga has arrested three men for soliciting sex from children over the Internet, one from as far away as the Mojave Desert who traveled to Gilroy to meet the young female Madruga posed as online. 

In the beginning, Madruga found it embarrassing to go online posing as a girl. But after he started being contacted by pedophiles online, he got over it.

“You got to suck it up and try to reel these guys in,” he said. “Because (if they’re not stopped) they’re going to get a real kid.”

Currently, he has several online aliases with both sexes on multiple Internet sites and has been contacted by sexual predators at nearly every Web site a child might visit, including Myspace.com.

According to Madruga, statistics indicate that one in 15 children from the ages of 10 to 17 are solicited by predators online.

“I think that number is grossly outdated, because every single one of my profiles has been solicited,” he said. 

And, he believes technology is only creating more problems.

Because computers are portable and many cafes and stores offer free wireless Internet access, predators are able to travel easily and are difficult to trace.

Madruga is the only person in the Gilroy Police Department with the equipment and experience to talk to predators online. 

Often, predators will send him explicit live Web cam shows or photographs. While the images are difficult for him to watch, he sees another thing entirely: “I see nails in the coffin,” he said, about the damning evidence.

Madruga has been contacted by predators from every corner of the planet, from Brazil and Egypt, to Mexico and Canada. He’s been solicited in almost every type of chatroom and Web site he has entered.

“It doesn’t matter where I go or what I do, there’s always someone hitting on me,” he said. 

He never mentions sex to the people he’s chatting with online, letting them escalate the conversation – and they always do.

“I don’t hunt them down; they hunt me down,” he explained.

According to Madruga, at any given time there are 500,000 predators online. He’s visited the Internet Relay Chat site where more than three million users are logged on, some in chatrooms trading files of child pornography. One was of a movie of a 6-year-old girl being molested.

For Madruga, who must split his days among arson, physical abuse, major accidents and Internet crime cases, in addition to surfing the cyber world for sexual predators, the battle seems endless.

“They know that there are so many more of them, so little of us, and that the Internet is so big, there’s very little chance of us running into them,” he said. 

But that won’t stop him.

He’s proud of the three arrests he has made.

“Possibly, I protected three real victims from ending up in a folder on my desk,” he said. “I’d rather be proactive and get these guys before they get a hold of one of these children, before they’re then molested again in the hospital by doctors and nurses poking and prodding, before they are again molested by the court system. If I can save just one person from having all that done, it’s worth it to me.”

Tips for Parents

– A cell phone does not replace parenting. Know where your children are and who they are with. 

– Put computers with Internet access in open spaces in the home – not in children’s bedrooms. 

– Install software that indicates which sites children visit each day.

– Use parental controls on the computer; however, be aware that children can get around these.

– Know your child’s passwords for e-mail and accounts on Web sites such as Myspace.com

– Become familiar with sites and chatrooms.