It all started with a pizza box.

I had come home from work and found a pizza box on top of my computer monitor. I immediately knew that someone had been there using my computer since I never put anything on top of my monitor. My monitor is old and gets overheated quickly when things are placed on the top.

At first I didn’t think of it. My roommate had said he was going to move out soon, and I assumed at the time that he had gotten onto my computer to search for a rental truck or something similar to that. Still, when I opened my internet browser, I discovered my browser cache had been cleared and the history erased.

I also discovered I had a new virus on my computer.

Naturally, I thought that it was possible a virus had cleared out my cache and erased the history if my computer had been used in an attack. The only problem with this theory was the pizza box.

Someone had to physically be in my room to move it. And two weeks later, confirmation happened in the worst manner possible.

I had come home from work like I normally do, biking in. I was tired, hot, and sweaty, but I wanted to check my e-mail quickly before I jumped in the shower.
Since I also am a bit of a news phile, my tradition was to load up my.yahoo.com, which in addition to showing me the number of emails my Yahoo! e-mail had unread in the inbox, would also display a list of current headlines.

When I went to my.yahoo.com, I got an unusual screen rather than the normal screen. It looked like I wasn’t signed in, but in addition to that there was no place for me to sign in either. Frustrated, I decided to simply go to mail.yahoo.com instead, rather than using the my.yahoo.com portal.

When the mail opened, it was again an unfamiliar screen. But at this point I realized something. My computer was already signed in.

You see, I normally left my computer running full time at home while I was at work. This is probably mostly due to laziness in not wanting to wait for it to load when I got home, but it also came in handy when I had to transfer large files. In any case, since I always had my computer on and since there was no password to worry about, I realized suddenly that my roommate had been using my computer again. And this time, he hadn’t logged out.

Unfortunately for my roommate, I was also able to see some of the subject headers for the emails he had. And what I read gave me instant chills. The topics were all about “Little Girls” and various link headers and things of that nature. With trepidation, I clicked on one of the e-mails.

My fears were soon confirmed. Not only had my roommate been using my computer without my permission, but his e-mail inbox was leading me to believe he was actively searching for child porn. My first reaction was one of utter shock. This is something that happens to “other people”, not me. This can’t be real! It just can’t be.

But as I read through a few more e-mails, wherein other people spoke of stories involving incest and child rape, I knew that I had to do something. Then I stumbled across two emails that really disturbed me.

The first was an email FROM my roommate (it had his name on it) to the account. It was just a couple of links, and appeared to be him simply sending himself an e-mail from a different account. The second e-mail was different. It was in response to another person, and said (paraphrased), “I didn’t mean you are a registered sex offender. I meant I was. One of my co-workers found out about it and has been trying to get me fired for months. Well, the other night I printed out one of the stories at work and forgot about it. It was discovered, and the management put 2 and 2 together and I got fired.“

I was stunned. I knew my roommate was supposed to be moving out because he was supposedly being transferred in his job. But if he had just gotten fired, he wouldn’t be moving out. Furthermore, I had just learned it’s very possible he was a registered sex offender too! I couldn’t not act, and even though I knew there was no way this would not inconvenience me, I had no other option.

Unfortunately, my cell phone charger recently died. As a result, I had no way to contact anyone via phone. So I jumped on-line in #prosapologian, James White’s internet channel, where I have lots of friends. As soon as I was in there, I private messaged the first person I saw, Crewbear.

At this point, I was still in shock and my hands were shaking as I began to type. “I think my roommate has been surfing for child porn on my computer. What do I do?”

Crewbear, thankfully, was rational and calm (unlike me at the time). He immediately said, “Call the police.” I said I didn’t have a working phone. He immediately responded, “Give me their number.”

So a man from a completely different state called my local police and filed the original police report. About half an hour later, a police officer showed up at my house. As he entered the house, he said, “Now one of your roommates is a registered sex offender, right?“ The way he said it wasn’t really a question.
All I could respond with was, “One of his e-mails made me think he is.“

The officer glanced at my computer and informed me that he was not a computer techie, and I’d need to call “Sex Crimes” in the morning.

At this point I knew one thing. There was no way that I was going to let my roommate have access to my computer ever again. So I messaged Crewbear once more, and he called my brother-in-law, John. John drove down from his house (about 30 miles away) and took my computer back to his house.

I knew that I needed a cover story though. None of my roommates had been home when the police had come over, so they were clueless that I knew anything. I had to keep it that way until I heard from the police.
Thankfully, the earlier virus I had gotten on the computer gave me the idea. My cover story became “My computer had a virus and crashed. I took it to Circuit City for repairs.” Since my roommate used my computer and my default page was set to my own site, I put a story on my blog as well, just in case he read it to see why my computer was suddenly missing.

The next day, John dropped the computer off where I work. In my department, we have a secure room that I stored the computer in. It fit in with the other computers. At the same time, I looked up my roommate’s name on the sex offender’s registry for Colorado. Sure enough, he was listed there as a multiple offense felon. At that point, I notified my HR department about what I had discovered and asked them for guidance. There were a few reasons for this–first, I am friends with one of the HR guys; secondly, I work at a Christian non-profit that has, as one of it’s ministries, outreach programs for teens. I didn’t want what my roommate did to reflect on this ministry, and I also knew they had some experience in dealing legally with the issue. Then, finally, I called the Sex Crimes number and left a message there.

Now the waiting began. There was no response from the police at all, no call backs for a week. At the end of the week, I finally decided to take my computer back to my home because I needed to use it, and if the police weren’t going to look over it I certainly had plenty of tasks I could use it for instead! So I took it to my house, and once there realized that I had set my temporary internet files to store onto my external hard drive instead of my internal hard drive. Ironically, the entire time I had my computer at work, I had “no evidence” of anything at all!

In any case, the next week passed by and it appeared the police weren’t going to respond to my phone calls at all. My cover story was still holding–neither of my two roommates suspected that I knew anything different. But I was now an actor in my own home. Every day I would go home and pretend I didn’t know anything. I would have to smile and nod my head and be friendly toward the guy I had taken to calling, in my mind, “My [expletive] sex offender roommate.”

My dislike for the man was formed not only from the fact that he was a pervert who had dragged me, against my will, into the middle of his perversion, but also because I know what it’s like to have been abused as a child. Thankfully, I was never sexually abused, and my abuse was at the hands of people my own age who had pretended to be my friends. But I knew how much it had affected my own life, how even to this day I have problems trusting people (it was my “friends” after all who had so savagely attacked me). And now I knew that this man was most certainly not getting better–he was doing the very things that would lead him toward another attack.

You see, his convictions were two-fold. One was for sexual assault of a child, the other for possession of child pornography. I researched and saw the statistics, that most sex offenders are repeat offenders and that convictions are few and far between, not only because they are underreported but because sometimes there isn’t enough evidence for a conviction.

I had a molester in the room next to mine and I knew he was doing things that would lead toward more children being molested, if there hadn’t already been more.

That all changed on the afternoon of June 6. In the middle of the afternoon, I got a phone call. It was from my other roommate (the non-sex offender roommate). He said, “We have a situation at home, and I just need to make sure you’re not heading home anytime soon.”

I said, “No, I’m still here until 4:30 this afternoon. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Well, the SWAT team is here and they’re looking for [my other roommate]. He’s in a lot of trouble.”

At that point, I felt a tiny bit of relief. It was fairly short-lived, however, as about half an hour later I got a phone call from a detective who was interviewing my sex-offender roommate. He apologized for not reaching back sooner, since there was an apparent mix-up with the first officer who responded to my home. The detective told me that he should have been personally notified, and if that had been done he would have gone over that night and looked at my computer then. After that, I told him about how I had called the Sex Crimes division, and he said the number I used was just a message number, and the people who would be able to check it were out of state on a different investigation until that day. He said they were currently going through the messages, but the search warrant for my house had been issued because my roommate was already under investigation for allegedly uploading child pornography at the public library. When they executed the search warrant, they discovered my own call from a few weeks ago.

In any case, my computer was confiscated. Again, the detective apologized, but told me that there was currently a 10-month lag for forensics on computers.
He said he would try to get the computer sent to the Pueblo PD for faster examination, but couldn’t make any promises there. And naturally, it’s still possible that my computer will remain evidence throughout a trial too.

So, while things didn’t go out as quickly as I wanted, the police have finally acted, and now the truth can come out. I will continue to inform people as this progresses. But for now, prayers are definitely encouraged.