Investigator  Morgan Calohan from Bedford County Sheriff’s Office

Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force unit, IDing a baby

     On January 16, 2013, Erik Estrada visited the Verona Moose Family Center to talk about Internet safety and children. Gina Farthing, of the News Virginian, covered the event in this article.

Posted: Sunday, January 27, 2013 7:30 am
By Gina Farthing For The News Virginian

     Imagine being invited to an event where a TV star from the ‘70s and ‘80s will be; that’s what members of the Verona Moose Family Center got to do Jan. 16.  Following a two-hour spaghetti supper fundraiser, Erik Estrada from the TV show, “CHiPs,” which aired from 1977 to 1983, visited with about 50 Moose members and their families.
     Estrada’s appearance wasn’t about rekindling the entertainment side of his career.  No, he came to help adult caretakers of children become more aware of the dangers that Internet usage could pose to young innocents and efforts within the law enforcement and civic community designed to minimize the threat – particularly from online predators known as pedophiles.
     Law enforcement, which began battling Internet crimes against children years ago, realized their efforts were being outrun by online criminals and created a way to intercept efforts directed towards their prey.
     Thus, Safe Surfin’ Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, was created in 2000 by a group of people including the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office and Southern Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, formerly known as Operation Blue Ridge Thunder, to educate potential victims.
     “They realized they were never going to stop it by continually searching online,” said Robin Sundquist, a cofounder of Safe Surfin’.
     It was time to educate children, parents, teachers, libraries, PTAs and others who provided care for children.
     “It is so kids can learn not to be taken,” said Estrada.  “With education they can’t be had.”
     Child porn has been around forever, Sundquist said.  “It used to be ordered through the mail from Eastern-bloc countries that sold nude pictures of children until the U.S. Postal Service worked to stop it and made it very difficult to get.
     But today, she said, there are social networking sites, Skype, phone cameras, webcams and a lot of people making material in their own homes.
     Even images posted by loving parents, for example, of their child’s first bath, can be retrieved from the Internet and used to create pornography.
     “People need to be aware of how someone will react to what they post … it might spark something in them, even if the picture is innocent,” Sundquist said.
     With the FBI estimating that “88 million [kids] are online in the U.S. alone and will visit one or more of the 40,000-plus chat rooms routinely visited by child sexual predators,” even safety software parents could install on home computers might not prevent the threat.
     “Kids are so gullible,” she said, “and even if they can’t get on at home, they go to friends’ homes that might not have prevention software, or the library, or even their cell phones.  The key is to educate them beforehand.
     “According to the FBI, there is a 100-percent chance that your child will meet a sexual predator in a chat room and not even know it,” Sundquist said.
     But education costs money, which is why Moose International entered into an agreement with Safe Surfin’ to help provide funding and publicity, said Eddie Worth, a Moose member who travels with Estrada to events.
     “Without the Moose, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” he said.  “Eighty-five percent of our donations have come from Moose members and the money goes towards education.”
     Educational efforts include volunteers to speak to groups of people such as classes, community groups and civic organizations, businesses and more. Community events like Cop in a Box and EZID provide parents and caretakers opportunities to have children fingerprinted and photographed for future reference if an Amber Alert or missing child alert is needed.  Funding has also gone to a film effort, which made its premier in Lynchburg over the weekend of Jan.19.
     These are the reasons the Verona Moose Family Center held the event: to educate, to raise funds and to help members’ children get identified.  At the center that night, Moose members donated two checks to Safe Surfin’ totally $1,500.  Through previous donations, they also had provided the Augusta County Sheriff’s Department with an EZID system, which was used after the dinner.
     “Luckily, we’re fortunate enough that we haven’t had to use EZID,” said Cpl Derek Almarode, of the Augusta County Sheriff’s Department.  “And we’ve done several hundred children.”
     The film, “Finding Faith,” is about a girl named Faith who, based on true-life events, was abducted by a cell phone contact she thought was innocent. The faith-based film stars Estrada as a sheriff, which he also is in real life, with Bedford County.
     “’We can’t just focus on Internet safety now.  Technology is changing and child predators are always looking for new ways to hurt children,’ Brown stated,” on the film’s website.  “This story is a wake-up call for all parents to begin monitoring their children’s cell phones.  The situation emphasizes the importance of parental involvement.”
     Therefore, more education and awareness is needed.
     “There is only one trainer currently,” Worth said.  “He went to three states and gave classes to more than 5,000 kids.  We’re hoping to hire professionals to do the classes.”
     The estimated cost for those professionals, Worth said, is about $1 million. That is in addition to costs for specialized equipment such as the$2,500 EZID program, the $3,500 Cop in a Box program, free presentations to schools and free “Finding Faith” showings to be held at 200 churches nationwide.
     “People should go to the SafeSurfin.org for more information regarding volunteering, training and holding student events.  Oh, and we definitely take donations,” said Sundquist.  “We’re all volunteers right now.”

Erik Estrada in a more lighthearted moment during his visit to the Front Royal Moose Lodge on Monday night.

     Erik Estrada doesn’t just protect and serve in his acting roles. He also does both in his day-to-day life.
 
     Most famous for his role as Frank “Ponch” Poncherello on CHiPs in the 1970s and 1980s, Estrada visited the Front Royal Moose Lodge 829 Chapter 1194 on Monday night to talk about the Safe Surfin’ Foundation.
 
     Moose lodges around the country support the foundation, which teaches children about the dangers of Internet predators.
 
     “To educate is the only way you’re going to save anyone,” Estrada said. “It’s the best thing for prevention. That’s the only way children are not going to be able to be smoked as I say, or had, over the Internet by these very shady, intelligent sexual online predators.”
 
     Raised in Spanish Harlem in New York City, Estrada dreamed of following in the footsteps of his mother’s boyfriend, a police officer whom he idolized.
 
     “I’ve always had the passion to be a cop,” he told the Moose Lodge members.
 
     That vocational passion was put on hiatus at 17 when the romantic passion he felt for a classmate led him to drama club.
 
     But, 10 years ago, he went to police academy in Indiana and became a reserve police officer in Muncie. Several years ago, he heard about the work Sheriff Mike Brown in Bedford County, Va., was doing to fight online child predators.
 

Front Royal resident Norma Capps talks about Internet predators with actor and activist Erik Estrada on Monday night at the Front Royal Moose Lodge 829 Chapter 1194.

     The men met the next day, and Estrada soon met a young woman  who was snatched by an Internet pedophile. A day later, Estrada went  to the headquarters of Operation Blue Ridge Thunder, the cyber patrol set up by the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office in 1998, according to the office’s website.

 
     It was there that Estrada was given a shocking glimpse into the realities of childhood sexual abuse.
 
One of the undercover investigators typed in the characters “4YO” into a computer.
 
     “He says, ‘What’s that?’” Estrada recalled. “And, I don’t know squat. He says, ‘Watch this.’ He clicks a key on his keypad. All of a sudden, the screen starts to fill up with these IP numbers, identification numbers. About five different screens just filling up. It stopped at 457. He says, ‘There, you see that? There you have it. That’s it. Four hundred fifty-seven people want to share 4-year-old child pornography with you right now.’”
 
     The investigator was going to click on one, and Estrada, whose daughter was then only 5 herself, said he didn’t want to see it.

 
     “He just grabbed me by my neck and says, ‘Sit down,’” Estrada said.

 
     The video showed a cute little girl twirling around in a white dress.
 
     “Then, all of a sudden, it’s cut to her being bound and two men are on her,” said Estrada as some women in the audience gasped. “I got up and left the room. I went outside. I lit a cigar. I think I smoked two of them before I went back in. I was a mess. You get very emotional. It will affect you.
 
     “You get enraged, and then you get involved.”
 
     He told Brown he wanted to be active in fighting the scourge of child pornography and abuse.
 
     “I was hooked ever since,” said Estrada. “That’s why I do what I do.”
 
     What he does is promote Safe Surfin’, which provides free educational materials to schools, churches and other organizations.  He also has lobbied the General Assembly on behalf of Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces.
 
     Perverts have moved from parks to family living rooms, Estrada said. They groom children and teenagers and then coerce them into meeting them in person, where the child can be grabbed. From there, Estrada said, they take the youngster to a hotel, “strap them to the wall, the floor, rape them for two or three days in a row, and the lucky child is the one that gets murdered.”
 
     Those who survive are often shattered, he said.
 
     Estrada sat down for an interview after his presentation – and after he’d posed for pictures with eager fans, and accepted a check for Safe Surfin’ from the Moose Lodge.
 

Front Royal Moose Lodge 829 Chapter 1194 Senior Regent Bobbie Jo Whited presents a check to Erik Estrada to benefit the Safe Surfin’ Foundation Monday night

     “This is a no-brainer,” he said of fighting child predation. “Once they lose their innocence, they never get it back. People don’t want to hear about it because it’s too ugly. It’s too scary. It’s human nature [to block it out] until it happens to you, until you’re directly affected by a situation like that.
 
     “We got a major problem just in the state of Virginia, but it’s everywhere. It’s everybody’s problem…but people don’t want to believe it.”
 
     The Penn State abuse and cover-up is an example of this.
 
     “That was a sin,” Estrada said emphatically. “They let [Jerry Sandusky] get away with it. They saw it. They knew it, and they let him get away with it. They’re just as guilty by association and by omission.”
 
     It all comes back to education.
 
     “I want the parents to be aware that this is out there,” Estrada said.
 
     He is in a new film, called “Finding Faith,” produced by the Safe Surfin’ Foundation and based on real cases.
 
     Front Royal resident Norma Capps talked to Estrada about the dangers children today face.
 
     “My question to him — how young,” she said. “You think of 13, 16-year-old girls or young boys. You don’t think of infants.”
 
     For more information on the film, go to www.findingfaithfilm.com. For more information on the foundation, go to www.safesurfin.org.
 
Contact staff writer Sally Voth at 540-465-5137 ext. 164, or svoth@nvdaily.com

SSF Director of Development - Eddie Worth,

Moose International Supreme Governor - Wes Crowder,

SSF Director of Research - Ron Porter