Fresh Loaf

1. In the auction for Creative Loafing, the winning bidder is … (… these guys. Hey, they seem pretty OK!)

2. The mayoral ‘machine’ goes haywire, Reed fires back (Memo urges Atlanta’s black leaders to rally behind a single black mayoral candidate — to keep a white candidate out of office.)

3. Wendy Whitaker, symbol of flawed sex offender law, rearrested (When she was 17, Whitaker gave one of the most regrettable blow jobs ever.)

4. Sen. Jeff Chapman’s views on water conservation, water wars (Chapman’s one of the Gold Dome’s greatest enigmas — one of the few Republicans who doesn’t march in lockstep with his fellow pachyderms.)

5. Oxendine: Build an interstate through East Atlanta? Let’s talk! (Um, no.)

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Evidence of an offense Zach Higgins committed at age 14 later came back to haunt him.

Editor’s note: It is CL’s policy to withhold the name of a victim of sexual assault.

The young woman was in trouble. Her father was on his way to Atlanta to pick her up and bring her back to their Fayette County home. He had just found out, through her roommate at Georgia Tech, that she’d been hanging out in her dorm room with her boyfriend. That wasn’t allowed. More importantly, the woman’s family deeply disapproved of him.

Once she was back in Fayette County, the woman got into an intense discussion with her parents. They wanted to know why she continued to see someone they didn’t want her to see.

“My parents were asking me why I was acting that way,” the young woman later told a Fayette County jury. “And I just told them because I felt like I wasn’t worth anyone better. And they kept asking me why, until it finally came out.”

She told her parents that her insecurity stemmed from another boy and an incident that occurred almost three years earlier, at the beginning of her junior year at Sandy Creek High School. The two had worked together at a local pizza place, and she admittedly had a crush on him. He showed up at their house one night, while her parents weren’t home. She said at first, they were watching TV. Then, after they started kissing, he forced himself on her.

Upon hearing her story, her parents drove her straight to the police department, where she hand-wrote a statement, dated April 21, 2008, describing the events of that night in 2005:

“I told him that’s enough, he should leave, and I’ll talk to him another day,” the young woman wrote. “But he ignored me and said, ‘I’ll take my pants off, and then you.’ So he unzipped his pants and pushed them down. And that’s when I froze, and I kept telling myself there’s no way he’s going to do that.”

Continue reading “Was Zach Higgins convicted of rape based on the evidence?” >>

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On Monday I reported that Habersham County Sheriff DeRay Fincher has ordered his county’s sex offenders to shun all Halloween-related activities. Habersham’s sex offenders are not allowed to take their kids trick-or-treating, decorate their homes, don a costume, or even answer their doors.

I spoke to Fincher yesterday and he told me the restrictions he’s imposing even extend to sex offenders who were not involved in crimes against children.

“I just do a blanket thing,” says Fincher.

He knows of no instances in Habersham County of a sex offender using Halloween to lure a victim, but says “I would rather be proactive than reactive.”

Additionally, Fincher says he has ordered all sex offenders in Habersham who are on parole or probation to attend a meeting on Halloween night between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.

The purpose of the meeting, he says, is to sequester sex offenders on a night when there are lots of children out at night. The sex offenders will be provided with food and a television.

When I mentioned to Fincher that his “no-decorations-for-sex-offenders” decree might compel innocent county residents to decorate their homes just so they don’t look like sex offenders, he laughed and said he hadn’t considered that.

“I don’t have my house decorated,” he said, noting he lives in an out-of-the-way community with few, if any, trick-or-treaters.

“If I lived in town, though, I’d probably decorate.”

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Habersham County Sheriff DeRay Fincher has a warning for his county’s sex offenders: Participate in any Halloween-related activities and you will be arrested.

According to the county’s web site, sex offenders are forbidden from giving out candy to trick-or-treaters, accompanying their own children to trick-or-treat, wearing Halloween costumes, or even decorating their homes. Additionally, the sheriff warns sex offenders they must be reachable by phone from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Halloween.

Does Habersham, a rural county of 42,000 in mountainous northeast Georgia, have an especially high rate of child sex abuse?

I don’t know.

The highest point in Habersham County is a 3,809 feet peak called Young Lick Knob. Maybe that explains the Sheriff’s concern.

If I lived in Habersham County, I’d be ticked off. I don’t decorate my house for Halloween because I want to minimize the number of kids who ring the bell. My dogs bark for a couple of minutes each time the bell rings. It drives me bonkers.

But if I lived in Habersham, however, I would now feel compelled to decorate my home elaborately, lest any of my neighbors suspect that I’m a sex offender.

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The Doing His Career No Favors Award

[One in a series of online awards for Georgia lawmakers. You'll find the rest in CL's Golden Sleaze issue Wednesday both in print and online.]

Rep. Robbie Mumford, R-Conyers, spends so much time outside the GOP fold that you wonder if it wouldn’t be easier on him simply to switch parties. Then again, he might not be as valuable a voice in challenging some of the really bad policy that his fellow lawmakers propose. Again this year, Mumford was one of a lonely few Republicans who spoke out against a bill to allow a divided jury to impose a death sentence. And he was the only GOP member of a House committee to sign on to a minority report on Rep. Jerry Keen’s reworked bill to establish residency restrictions for sex offenders. As such, Mumford offered not only his lawyerly opinion that the bill is unconstitutional, but he also criticized the House majority leader’s legislation on well-documented grounds that it actually could make Georgia’s children less safe from sexual abuse. He also introduced a bipartisan bill to strengthen rights for victims of sexual assault. Let’s hope Mumford isn’t shooting his political career in the foot.

(Photo: Courtesy of Georgia House)

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