Suicide of Molester Casts Shadow Over Bitter Debate

For nearly four years, Chuckie Claxton lived anonymously amid the gated horse pastures and moss-draped oaks of the Florida Orange Groves subdivision. Then the crimes of others drew new attention to his own.

During the statewide outrage over the arrests of sex offenders in the separate killings of two young girls, somebody in the Groves went to the state police website to see if any sex offenders were living in the neighborhood.

That person -- authorities don’t know who -- found an entry about Claxton’s molestation of a young girl 15 years before, printed it out on bright yellow paper and blanketed the neighborhood with dozens of fliers.

The poster didn’t mention that the 5-foot-9, 135-pound Claxton relied on a wheelchair, that police no longer considered him a serious threat, and that he had no further sex offenses.

The flier’s creator added something incendiary. At the bottom of the page, in bold block letters, were the words “CHILD RAPIST.”

Four days after the fliers appeared, 38-year-old Chuckie Claxton was dead, an empty bottle of scotch, a bag of pills and one of the posters beside him.

“This pushed him over the edge,” his grieving father says.

Florida is a state suddenly preoccupied with the notion of sexual deviates lurking in scary proximity to children. Volusia County is closing school bus stops near the homes of registered offenders. Miami Beach is considering nearly half-mile buffer zones around schools to essentially ban sex offenders from the city. And Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation allowing lifelong electronic monitoring of certain sexual predators.

In all this flurry, Claxton’s suicide has cast a gray shadow over what to many is a black-and-white issue. It has raised the question of how far people should be allowed to go to protect their children from sex offenders -- and whether a sex offender can ever fully pay his debt to society.

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Marion County is nestled in north-central Florida, halfway between Orlando and Gainesville. It is the home of some of the nation’s top thoroughbred horse farms.

It is also home to 550 of the state’s nearly 30,000 registered sex offenders. One of them was Clovis Ivan Claxton III.

The middle of three boys, Claxton was born in Miami. His father was serving with the Army in Vietnam, so his grandfather gave him the name he had given his second son. The father went by Chuck. The boy preferred Chuckie.

A flu vaccination at age 10 led to a viral infection that put the avid Cub Scout into a coma. He awoke to a world of wheelchairs and leg braces, of seizures and epilepsy and no bladder control -- a world, Jane and Chuck Claxton say, in which mentally he would be forever a boy.

In 1991, prosecutors in Tacoma, Wash., charged the then-24-year-old Claxton with two counts of first-degree child rape. By then, Claxton had regained some mobility.

Police say Claxton took his caretaker’s 6-year-old daughter up to the attic on several occasions, had oral sex with her and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“He told her it was a secret and not to tell,” prosecutors wrote in an affidavit.

Claxton’s lawyer remembers him as slow and unable to focus, although not legally incompetent. Claxton pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of first-degree child molestation and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

After his release, Claxton had twice-monthly sessions with a therapist.

“He has repeatedly emphasized the importance of avoiding contact with children,” psychologist Sally Wing wrote to corrections officials in 1994. “His offense appeared to be opportunistic, rather than one involving a cyclical pattern of offending.”

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In late 2001, the family moved to Florida. They bought a spacious stucco and stone ranch house just outside Ocala and created an apartment for their son, connected to the main house by a door through the kitchen.

There he could play his Alabama and Shania Twain CDs, watch his favorite baseball player, Ken Griffey Jr., and indulge his love of wolves. He had wolf blankets, wolf throw pillows, wolf paintings, even a miniature wolf fountain.

Despite constant struggles with alcohol and drugs, Chuckie Claxton was a “good kid” with a kind heart, his father says.

Claxton didn’t make many friends in the neighborhood, but he met people through Internet chat rooms. Starved for attention, he was often taken advantage of. “He’d buy them dinner. He’d buy them beer. He’d buy them anything they wanted,” his father says. “Anything to fit in.”

But that wasn’t enough.

In January, he overdosed on alcohol, pills and cocaine. He was in a coma for a week.

“We thought he was brain dead, but he came out of it,” his father says. “A little worse for wear, even slower than he was before.”

In recent months, things began looking up. After years of fruitless applications, Medicaid had finally authorized a motorized three-wheeled scooter for Claxton. Before, a trip to the mailbox left him exhausted, but he could now ride around the neighborhood without asking his parents for help.

“He was so happy,” his father says.

Until April 18.

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Claxton and his mother were returning from the grocery that afternoon when they noticed a bright yellow poster on a telephone pole near their home. On it were his mug shot, his description, address and arrest history.

Claxton had long since come to grips with his offender status. His parents say he would often volunteer the information to new acquaintances.

After the recent high-profile killings of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford and 13-year-old Sarah Lunde, Sheriff Ed Dean instituted a program of monthly face-to-face visits with all registered offenders. Deputies had checked in on Claxton in late March; the visit went well.

But seeing the poster made him livid.

“Why are they doing this?” he asked his parents. “I don’t bother anybody.”

They ripped it down. But the next day, Claxton saw another flier while riding his scooter down the road -- this one with the “CHILD RAPIST” warning.

“ ‘That’s not true, Mom,’ ” Jane Claxton recalls him shouting.

Distraught, Claxton called the sheriff’s office, concerned that his neighbors were “out to possibly harm him” and saying he “just wanted to end it all.”

Claxton was involuntarily committed, but was released after about 12 hours with a prescription for anxiety medication.

In the meantime, more fliers had begun showing up in neighborhood newspaper boxes.

That evening, a friend came over to comfort Claxton. What the Claxtons didn’t know was that the friend had taken their son to buy a half-gallon bottle of scotch -- and that after he fell asleep, she had left.

On April 21, around 6:30 a.m., Chuck Claxton went to make sure his son was getting ready; he had an appointment to be fitted with new braces for his painfully twisted ankles. He found his son lying on his right side, fully clothed.

“He was cold.”

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On the day Claxton called the sheriff’s office, County Commissioner Randy Harris introduced a proposal to put up metal signs in neighborhoods where sexual offenders and predators live. In their anger and frustration, the Claxtons lashed out at Harris, accusing him of whipping up a kind of sexual “McCarthyism” that contributed to their son’s death.

Harris -- a three-term Republican with a Christian flag on his desk, the Ten Commandments on his office wall and a “Choose Life” license plate on his pickup -- says Claxton’s death was tragic. But his compassion extends only so far.

“If anyone construes him [as] a victim, he’s a victim of his own circumstance,” he says, citing Claxton’s crimes in Tacoma. “I believe that Mr. Claxton had prior emotional and psychological issues that had far more to do with his death than these signs.”

But attorney Antoni Froehling, who represented Claxton in his criminal case, finds it all too foreseeable.

Froehling has a problem with a system that outs sex offenders but not burglars, drug dealers or murderers, and he believes that this kind of public branding only makes it harder for sex offenders to reintegrate into society.

“I don’t see any evidence that it has any impact,” he says, “other than to make the gap-toothed rednecks of the world feel better about themselves.”

Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says what happened in the Claxton case was “dangerously close” to vigilantism.

“The fact of the matter is, they will live in our communities,” she says. “There aren’t enough spaces in prison.... So we must look at the best approaches to dealing with this, instead of giving in to hysteria.”

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Less than a week after Claxton’s death, sheriff’s officers fanned out across the county with fliers warning people of sex offenders in their neighborhoods -- so people wouldn’t take matters into their own hands again.

Tina Teegarden was shocked when Lt. Fred Chisholm showed up at her horse farm and told her the 36-year-old man who’d recently moved in next door was on probation for indecent assault on a minor.

Although lamenting Claxton’s suicide, Teegarden approves of the leafleting. “I deal with animals all the time,” she says, “and we castrate them.”

Officials say whoever created the flier tampered with a state form, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Dean has processed the unauthorized Claxton fliers for fingerprints and intends to prosecute.

Chuck Claxton was initially eager to have someone held accountable for the fliers. But now he’d just as soon they let it go.

“I forgive whoever did it,” he says, choking back tears. “You meant well. I guess you meant well. You didn’t know him.”