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Saturday, September 27, 1997

Communities asks how sex offender slipped through safety net to harm children

By STEVE CLEMENTS / Wichita Falls Times Record News

BRYSON, Texas -- When Jessie James Meadows moved home to Jack County in early 1996, he brought a lot of baggage with him:

A conviction on aggravated assault charges for holding a knife to the throat of a 6-year-old Abilene girl and forcing her to undress.

A separate charge, also out of Abilene, for sexual indecency with a child.

And a history of arrests and "sexual acting-out behavior" that dated to his stay at a Corsicana, Texas, treatment center in 1982.

But apparently, most residents in Bryson and nearby Jermyn knew little about the 30-year-old mentally retarded man who grew up in their midst.

Sure, they say they thought that the long-haired, mustachioed man was a "little off." But he didn't seem dangerous -- just odd.

How did Meadows slip through the layers of the state's judicial and mental health systems and the safety nets that are supposed to protect people

from hurting others or themselves?

Meadows seemed to bounce from one agency to another from the time he was a teen-ager until last month, when a judge and jury in Jacksboro finally took steps to take him off the streets -- and country roads -- for good.

Earlier this month, a Jack County jury found him mentally incompetent to stand trial and sent him to a mental institution for what officials said would be the rest of his life.

No one raised a fuss when he moved into a mobile home located right across the street from the Bryson School, where he could watch the children walk home every day.

"Very few people knew about his past. I knew a little, but I didn't know everything," said Joe Clayton, who drives a bus to Jermyn for the Bryson school district. "Mainly, it was all rumors. I didn't know anything to be a fact."

And despite warnings from a well-meaning Meadows relative, some even thought Jessie James would make a good baby sitter.

"I tried to caution those people. I told them, with his past and all, that it wasn't a good idea to have him baby- sitting," said Jessie Blankenship, Meadows' step-grandmother and one of his few living relations. "But they wouldn't listen to me and everything went wrong."

Meadows eventually was arrested on a charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child after he was accused of performing oral sex on a Bryson boy younger than 14.

Now, he is set for transfer to Vernon State Hospital, which treats Texas'

dangerous mental patients, said Jack County Sheriff Danny Nash.

If the Vernon hospital isn't familiar to Meadows, the setting certainly is: Meadows has been in and out of hospitals and living centers since he was a teen-ager.

According to court files, Meadows never knew the name of his real mother, who died in a wreck when he was only 2. His father, James, remarried shortly after her death and his new wife brought her four children to the home.

With six children to raise, Meadows' parents had little time for him, according to court records, which said the couple had a "deep resentment" toward the boy and wanted to "dump him."

Meadows was only 14 when, in 1981, he was packed off to a now-defunct children's ranch at Nocona. It was the start of a 16-year odyssey through group homes, jails and hospitals that ended right where it started: back in the Jermyn-Bryson area.

From Nocona, Meadows was transferred to the Corsicana center. When he "acted out sexually" there in 1982, he was sent to a Big Spring home that featured a little tighter security.

There, he was again expelled for "repeated instances of inappropriate sexual behavior," according to court documents.

By now an adult, Meadows was free to go where he liked because he was never arrested or charged with a crime while a teen.

He returned to Jermyn in 1985, but stayed only a short time before he traveled back to the Abilene area on his own, either by hitchhiking or riding a bus, according to court records. Authorities aren't sure where he lived, but knew he had a girlfriend who lived near Abilene.

He was arrested by Abilene police in 1987 and charged with stealing a car. He was still in jail when, a month later, he was arrested on misdemeanor assault charges related to an incident that happened while he was living on the street.

While in jail, court documents say, he bragged to other inmates that he was "retarded so the police won't do anything." That attitude wasn't surprising to Clayton, who said he believes that Meadows was mentally responsible for his actions.

"I think he knew what he was doing," the school bus driver said. "He may have been retarded, but he knew what he was doing and he knew what they'd do to him when they caught him."

Prosecutors gave Meadows five years probation for stealing the car. For the misdemeanor assault conviction, they credited him with time served and released him from jail.

He had been on probation for little more than a year when, in 1988, he attacked the 6-year-old girl in Abilene. He was charged with aggravated assault, a felony, but was handed another probationary term and released from jail.

He was sent to a Volunteers of America group home but left without permission and, still on probation, traveled to Wichita Falls. Shortly after he arrived in 1989, he was arrested on another child molestation charge out of Taylor County.

Meadows was never prosecuted on that charge, but Taylor County authorities sent him back to another Volunteers of America home in Fort Worth. He left that home in December 1994, only to find himself re-arrested for violating his probation.

This time, he was sent to a halfway house in Fort Worth. He won permission from his probation officer to move in early 1996 to Bryson, where he lived in the mobile home across from the school. He had been there only a few months when he was arrested for attacking the Bryson boy.

While he lived in Bryson, Meadows should have been shackled by the scrutiny of the Jack County probation office. That supervision was a little more intense than most probationers experience, but not by much, said Sam Shanafelt, district probation officer for Jack and Wise counties.

"I would say that he received a little more attention than most, but we're not equipped to deal with the very intense supervision like some of the big cities," Shanafelt said.

"We're limited in what we can do with someone like that."

Nash said he believes the probation department kept a close eye on Meadows, even though his probation officer died of cancer shortly after Meadows moved to Bryson.

"We talked to the probation office a lot, but they didn't feel they had grounds to do anything to revoke his probation," Nash said. "And we had several calls out there, things that we were investigating, but we never had enough evidence to arrest him."

Among those incidents, Clayton said, was a complaint filed by a Jermyn woman who said Meadows was stalking her two daughters. Meadows had a motorcycle, Clayton said, which he rode to Jermyn.

He never approached the girls, but would park his motorcycle near their home and watch them get off the bus and walk into their home.

"She asked me to let them off last and watch them walk into the house, because they were all scared of him," Clayton said. "They sent a deputy out to talk to him about it, but he came back a few times anyway, just sitting there and watching them."

Deputies simply had no grounds to arrest Meadows, said Nash, who couldn't remember the specific instance cited by

Clayton but recalled similar complaints about Meadows.

"There were some things we didn't like, but we were not able to arrest him," Nash said. "That doesn't mean we liked to see those things happen."

And it's hard to revoke probation without an arrest, Shanafelt said.

"To really get something done, you need someone to sign a complaint, a statement," Shanafelt said. "We never got anything that allowed us to start the process to revoke the probation."

Eventually, Jermyn residents learned to be wary of Meadows, Clayton said,

but apparently the word never filtered into Bryson, just seven miles south.

"There were a lot of the kids in Jermyn, especially the girls, who were afraid of him," Clayton said. "But nobody in Bryson knew what was going on."

One man, who lived just a few doors away from Meadows, said he knew nothing about Meadows' past. But he noticed the new neighbor who "acted off," so he forbade his children to ride their bike on that end of the street.

"I sure didn't know that he'd been arrested for messing with kids," said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous because Meadows' friends and family still live in the area. "It would have been nice for someone to warn us."

The problem faced by the Sheriff's Department, Nash said, is that Meadows

was never convicted on sexual assault charges. The attack on the Abilene girl was classified as aggravated assault, and law-enforcement officials are not allowed to post warnings about people convicted on assault charges, as they are with sexual offenders, he said.

"There are certain things you can't disclose and certain people you can't

identify," Nash said. "This wasn't a case where someone had molested a child

so their name automatically goes in the paper. Even on that, you don't put (sexual offenders') names in the paper."

And even now, most Bryson residents don't know the name Jessie James Meadows. Some say they heard about the case when he was arrested last year, but they quickly forgot about it.

School Superintendent Weldon Koepf, for example, said he knew nothing of Meadows or his past. Koepf just took the Bryson job this year, but, as he said, "It looks like somebody would have said something."

That angers Bryson residents like the man who lived down the street from Meadows, who said he lives in a small town to escape crime -- and keep criminals away from his children.

"I would have appreciated it if someone had just warned us, since we have small kids who play outside all the time," he said. "It just shows you that they can talk all they want about changing the system, but it still doesn't protect the people it's supposed to protect."

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Distributed by The Associated Press