50-year-old tried to meet, impregnate 11-year-old decoy from Facebook, Ohio cops say
An Ohio man is accused of trying to meet an 11-year-old girl with the intent to “impregnate her,” authorities said.
Court records show 50-year-old Gary Lee Skinner Jr. of Lancaster was arrested Sept. 18 on an importuning charge.
Officers from the Lancaster Police Department responded Sept. 16 to reports of a sexual offense, according to a probable cause affidavit.
They first met with Robert Bloom, head of Bikers Against Predators, a nonprofit that creates decoy underage Facebook profiles used to catch people who contact them requesting “underage pornographic content and/or solicit sexual activity,” court records show.
Skinner contacted one of the group’s decoy accounts of an 11-year-old girl, the group told police.
In a Facebook livestream, the group recorded Skinner meeting the decoy at a gas station and hugging her before they approached him and revealed the set-up.
“The group provided some documentation of their interactions and it is clear that Mr. Skinner was the first to interact with the decoy,” authorities said in the affidavit.
Bikers Against Predators also provided police with information that “Skinner’s intent upon meeting the 11-year-old decoy was to impregnate her that night,” court records show.
“It’s a super unusual situation compared to what we typically encounter, the allegation that there are folks who are not law enforcement who initiated this,” Skinner’s attorney Colin Peters told McClatchy News in an interview on Sept. 20.
“There’s a reason the cops usually do this stuff and not other people,” Peters said.
Skinner told authorities he knew the person he was supposed to meet was 11 years old, court records show.
Skinner was placed on house arrest and ordered to have no unsupervised contact with juveniles, according to court records. He is due back in court for a preliminary hearing Sept. 26.
Lancaster is about a 30-mile drive southeast from Columbus.