An Ounce of Prevention : Long Beach Police Use Unusual Tactics to Track a Convicted Molester

Leonard James McSherry was a name that Long Beach police had come to know all too well.

Over the last 15 years, McSherry had been arrested and prosecuted on half a dozen occasions for crimes ranging from indecent exposure to child molestation to the kidnaping of a 15-year-old girl.

So when the Police Department’s sexually exploited children’s unit heard that McSherry--now out of state prison after completing his most recent sentence--had been spotted prowling around schoolyards in Long Beach, Lakewood and other nearby communities, they launched an unusual maneuver.

For four weeks, anywhere from one to nine undercover police cars followed the 35-year-old man every time he left his Lakewood home.

The results were as unusual as the magnitude of the operation.

The officers who followed McSherry’s every move said they watched him stop at more than 40 parochial and public schools in what they believed was the first step toward accosting young children. On a few occasions, they said, he got out of the car, motioned to a child or walked toward children in an alley.

But never did McSherry do anything suspicious enough to justify an arrest.

Finally, still determined to find a way to restrict McSherry’s movements, police arrested him on suspicion of loitering--technically, lingering near schoolyards with intent to commit a crime.

In a plea-bargaining arrangement, McSherry pleaded guilty on Wednesday to two of five loitering counts, setting the stage for a one-year suspended sentence with a condition of probation that prosecutors said will send him back to prison if he approaches a schoolyard again.

Detective Mike Morgan, one of the exploited children’s unit’s three officers, defended the massive undercover effort.

“We thought there was a good chance he would grab a kid, and we didn’t think he should stay out there without us watching him,” Morgan said.

Morgan said police began receiving calls last year from school principals reporting that a man in a red pickup truck was hanging around their schools. The license on the truck led them to McSherry, they said.

Attempts by The Times to reach McSherry and his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Kent Thomas, for comment Thursday were unsuccessful, but a friend of McSherry’s family, Jim Johnson, said he was surprised to hear of the new charges because McSherry has “been trying to work hard on a clean slate” since he was last released from custody in October, 1984.

McSherry served four years in state prison for kidnaping a 15-year-old girl from a downtown Long Beach street in 1979--a crime police said occurred shortly after he had been released from prison after serving four years for molesting a 9-year-old Long Beach girl in 1974.

Officers who tailed McSherry acknowledged that he had been in no trouble with the law since his last prison term ended. Long Beach city prosecutor Robert Recknagel, who filed the loitering charges, said state parole authorities terminated McSherry’s parole last October--two years early--because of his clean record.

Defends Tactics

However, Morgan defended his department’s surveillance of McSherry.

“This was something we had to do,” he said. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I don’t know how much money the department spent on this, but we had to do something. We couldn’t just let him go out there.”

Added Recknagel, “This guy is an unusual case. He’s bad enough to justify that time of surveillance.”

McSherry’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 16 in Long Beach Municipal Court.