ATLANTA — (ed. note: The video above this story is related to a separate sex trafficking sting in Coweta County in June.)

A Georgia man was given a nearly 30-year prison sentence after manipulating girls as young as 12 into sending him sexually explicit photographs in a pattern of “sextortion” that victimized “dozens and dozens of young girls,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Edward Okenica, 24, of Forsyth County was given a 28-year sentence for pleading guilty to multiple counts of producing child pornography, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Byung J. “BJay” Pak announced.

Investigators identified at least 36 girls who were victimized, but they believe he coerced as many as 100 in total.

“Okenica victimized dozens of girls as young as 12 years old from his home,” the U.S. Attorney said. “He is a sexual predator who exploited the vulnerability and fragility of his victims by relying on the relative anonymity of social media platforms. This case is a reminder that sextortion remains a huge threat to our youth and to their families and parents need to remain vigilant to guard against it by monitoring their children’s social media activities.”

According to authorities, Okenica used social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram to reach young girls and convince them to send him sexually explicit photographs. He often offered the girls gift certificates or other tokens of payment as bribes, the U.S. Attorney said.

“He also frequently demanded that these girls perform sexually humiliating acts, including placing various household objects in their bodies. In many instances, the girls would grow uncomfortable and beg Okenica to stop,” the U.S. Attorney said. “But Okenica was indifferent to their pleas, even when the girls cried or harmed themselves.”

Okenica “bullied, threatened and extorted” girls for more photos and more sexual abuse if they tried to get the communications to stop. On multiple instances, the U.S. Attorney said Okenica made good on his threats to share the girls’ photos and videos with friends and family.

“If a girl blocked Okenica on Snapchat or Instagram, he frequently established new accounts to find the child and demand that she send him more sexually explicit photographs and videos,” the U.S. Attorney said.

Okenica pleaded guilty to 11 child pornography counts in March. He will be required to register as a sex offender upon his release and will have a lifetime of supervised release.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif — California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 145 into law on Friday.

The bill’s author, State Senator Scott Wiener, said the controversy over SB 145 was based on people’s misunderstanding of the changes and some lies about it. 

What is SB 145?

Current California law treats cases of statutory rape differently depending on what type of penetration occurred.

For cases involving a young adult and a minor where vaginal intercourse took place, a judge can decide whether or not to place the person convicted of statutory rape on the sex offender registry.

Before SB 145, the judge had to order that the person convicted to register as a sex offender should the rape include oral or anal sex.

SB 145 would eliminate automatic sex offender registration for young adults who have anal or oral sex with a minor. Instead, a judge would make the decision, just as they do now in cases involving vaginal intercourse.

This bill does not change the fact that it is illegal for an adult to have sex with a minor. SB 145 was meant to affect cases where the minor is a teenager between ages 14 to 17, and the offender, an adult, within a 10-year age range.

Why does this law matter?

Wiener (D-San Francisco) said in a press release that this new law was “ending blatant discrimination against LGBTQ young people.” 

“It’s appalling that in 2020, California continues to discriminate against LGBTQ people, by mandating that LGBTQ young people be placed on the sex offender registry in situations where straight people aren’t required to be placed on the registry,” Wiener said.

Wiener said the bill faced strong opposition from a “massive Trump, QAnon, and MAGA misinformation campaign.

“A 19-year-old has a 17-year-old girlfriend, and they have sex, that is statutory rape. But the law right now says that the judge does not have to put that 19-year-old boy on the sex offender registry because of the kind of sex that they were having,” Wiener said. “But if it’s a 19-year-old boy having sex with a 17-year-old boyfriend, the judge must put that 19-year-old onto the sex offender registry, even if it was completely consensual, even if they were boyfriends, even if there was nothing coercive or predatory about it.” 

The bill has sparked a lot of comments on ABC10’s and Senator Scott Wiener’s Facebook pages, including false claims that the bill would make it so an 18-year-old could rape an 8-year-old.

“This bill has no application to anyone under the age of 14,” Wiener said. “And that age range is an existing category in the law. It has existed for almost 100 years.”

Despite death threats and negative comments directed toward Wiener, the bill passed.

“[It’s been] supported by law enforcement, both the district attorneys and police chiefs support this bill, the rape crisis centers support this bill,” Wiener said.

COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — Jail officials say they were unaware that a Black Georgia inmate may have harbored racial resentment before they put him in a cell with a white man that he’s accused of beating to death.

Muscogee County Sheriff Donna Tompkins tells local news outlets that her staff didn’t know that Jayvon Hatchett allegedly told police that he was looking for a white man to kill after he was arrested for stabbing an employee of a Columbus auto parts store on Aug. 25. A police report listed the stabbing as an “anti-white” bias incident, but Tompkins said the sheriff’s office wasn’t given the report or informed of the threat.

“No one in my agency was aware when they classified him, when they put him where they put him,” Tompkins said. “No one was aware of a specific threat to any group, nor did he indicate any to our security, medical or mental health staff.”

Hatchett shared a cell with white inmate Eddie Nelson Jr. from Aug. 28 through Sept. 5. A deputy reported seeing Hatchett atop Nelson in the early morning hours of Sept. 5, local news outlets report. Tompkins said that as deputies pulled Hatchett from Nelson, he said Nelson had put a hair in Hatchett’s sandwich. Nelson died of what the Muscogee County coroner ruled was blunt force trauma.

“Somebody made a decision to put these two inmates in a cell together and that never should have happened. Whoever did it had to have known,” said Craig Jones, a lawyer representing Nelson’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit.

He said multiple deputies were in the courtroom during Hatchett’s preliminary hearing where officers testified Hatchett told them he stabbed the store clerk because he is white.

“You can’t tell me those officers in court didn’t go back to the jail and tell their supervisor, and their supervisor didn’t tell their supervisor,” Jones told WTVM-TV. “I think it was probably a total breakdown of communications, but this is a big enough deal that if you’re in charge of the jail, if you’re in charge of the sheriff’s department, you have to know about this.”

Tompkins said she ordered an internal investigation into what knowledge deputies had of the charges against Hatchett and how they decided to house him with Nelson. But she said sees no reason to call in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Nelson was in jail for a probation violation because he had failed to register as a sex offender.

Hatchett is charged with murder in Nelson’s death. The 19-year-old has pleaded not guilty, but officials say he has confessed and Tompkins notes the deputy saw what happened. Hatchett is charged with aggravated assault and possession of a weapon during a crime in the auto parts store stabbing.

Tompkins said both cellmates had seen the jail’s mental health provider.

NEW ORLEANS — One registered sex offender’s girlfriend called and said he was dead. Local law enforcement removed his name from the registry without checking if it was true. 

Another was convicted of a felony, resetting the clock on his removal from the registry. But because nobody updated the state database with the new conviction, his name is set to drop off the list before it legally should. 

A lifetime-registered sex offender hadn’t been to his seasonal check-ups with his local law enforcement agency in 11 years. But the agency never alerted anybody and continued marking him as active and compliant in the registry. 

These are some of the anecdotes used by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office to underscore multiple oversight failures in how agencies across Louisiana manage and keep track of registered sex offenders. 

Their findings were released Tuesday in a 59-page document sent to the governor, state attorney general and other public officials. 

As of February, there are more than 11,000 registered sex offenders in the state. They are separated into three categories: Tier 1 offenders must register for 15 years; Tier 2 offenders are on the list for 25 years; Tier 3 offenders are registered for life and have the strictest check-in requirements.

While no sex offenders had been left off the registry completely, auditors found that none of the agencies using the registry is responsible for making sure it is accurate and updated regularly. 

Local law enforcement agencies, called management agencies, did not have a cohesive standard for how information should be put into the database or what to do if a sex offender didn’t comply with the restrictions. 

A 2008 audit found the same issues, but no changes have been made in the past 12 years to how the system is administered.

The issues found by the auditing team ranged in scope, from missing employment verification to incorrect identifying information such as social security numbers. 

In a survey of 79 sex offenders on the registry, approximately 60% were classified in the wrong tier. For most, this meant they were classified as a higher tier than they should have been, and had their names on the registry for more time then legally required. 

Because only Tier 1 and 2 offenders are normally reviewed by the state’s Sexual Predator Apprehension Team — usually one year ahead of their assigned date to be struck from the registry — an offender incorrectly placed in Tier 3 could pay fines and be forced to register for life without legal justification. 

On the other side, 17 of the sex offenders reviewed were placed in lower tiers than they should have been, meaning they would be removed from the sex offender registry before they should be — if they should be removed at all. 

In some cases, even tracking sex offenders by their basic information raised challenges. At least 425 sex offenders had invalid or blank social security numbers in the registry. In at least three cases, the same number was used for multiple offenders. And auditors found two cases where incorrectly logged information made it look like offenders were younger than 10 years old. 

And employment data — which an offender is required to report within three days — was not up to date for the majority of sex offenders the state checked. 

Using workforce data, auditors found 421 sexual offenders who didn’t have a job listed. In a majority of the cases, they hadn’t told their managing agency about the job. But in roughly a quarter of the cases reviewed, the managing agency simply never put that information into the registry, where it would have been publicly displayed. 

The agency found at least 721 offenders who were at least two months late for their required check-ins with law enforcement, with the longest gap being 11 years, during which the lifetime offender told auditors he thought his name had been removed from the registry. 

He had never been marked as non-compliant with his check-ins and the management agency in charge of him never looked to get a warrant for failing to appear. 

Across the state, about 4.5% of registered sex offenders are listed as non-compliant, according to state data. 

In Orleans Parish, that number is much higher. The NOPD reported 55 non-compliant sex offenders out of 550, meaning about 10% were not completing required regular updates. Only three parishes have a higher percentage of non-compliant offenders. 

But the New Orleans Police Department receives the third-most state funding in the state from a fund designed to offset the costs of checking on sex offenders — approximately $43,000. 

The solution auditors found to most, if not all of these problems, was legislation designating one of the agencies involved in the registry’s upkeep as the official agency responsible for it. They said the Louisiana State Police would be the most likely candidate for the job. 

But LSP officials balked at taking on the responsibility of managing the sex offender registry, saying they didn’t have the manpower or the authority to do so.

It is likely that the state police will be able to continue avoiding the burden of registry management for the immediate future. There is seemingly no legislative interest in addressing the issues laid out in the audit, and the 2008 one before it. Despite state auditors finding many of the same oversight problems then, there has been no legislation put forward in the 12 years between the audits aimed at consolidating the responsibility for the sex offender registry. 

In the meantime, at least 62 sex offenders don’t even have a schedule set up in the registry for check-ins, meaning there is no way to track whether they have been keeping law enforcement officials up to date with their information. 

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COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia county inmate was found beaten to death in his cell, authorities said.

Muscogee County Jail inmate Eddie Nelson Jr., 39, was pronounced dead Saturday morning, news outlets reported.

Sheriff Donna Tompkins said inmate Jayvon Hatchett, 19, is suspected in the beating death, which is being investigated. Additional details weren’t immediately released.

Hatchett was charged with aggravated assault and possession of a weapon on Aug. 25, accused of stabbing an AutoZone employee because of his race. Hatchett, who is Black, told Columbus police that he “felt the need to find a white male to kill” after watching videos of police brutality, Police Sgt. R.S. Mills said.

Nelson, a white man, was booked on Aug. 26 and charged with probation violation and failure to register as a sex offender, according to jail records.

It’s unclear whether Hatchett had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. (AP) — A longtime pastor with metro Atlanta churches was sentenced to five years in prison and another 15 years of probation on child molestation charges.

Benjamin August Harter, 81, pleaded guilty to three counts of child molestation last month, the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office told news outlets Thursday.

Harter was arrested Aug. 30, 2019, five days after the Forsyth sheriff’s office learned of the molestation accusations. Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Cpl. Doug Rainwater released no details at the time of Harter’s arrest, but he said detectives found “ample probable cause” after their investigation began.

Harter must register as a sex offender when he is released from prison.

Harter served as pastor at Ebenezer Primitive Baptist Church in Sandy Springs, beginning in 2014. The church’s website said Harter has led congregations in Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Atlanta and the Philippines. An associate pastor previously said Harter wasn’t a pastor or a memebr of the church.

Harter was also the pastor at Bethany Primitive Baptist Church, now located in Suwanee, for nearly three decades beginning in November 1971.