Kevin Patrick Kendall just can't keep his hands off minor girls, if an anti-child exploitation task force is to be believed.
A registered sex offender residing in Long Beach, Kendall is accused of sharing sexy talk in a teen chat room with a 13-year-old girl who he also arranged to meet.
The thing is, it wasn't really a 13-year-old girl.
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The Orange County Child Exploitation Task Force (OCCETF)–whose members include officers from Homeland Security Investigations, the Orange County Sheriff's Department, the Orange County District Attorney's office and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service–was monitoring an online chat room advertised for teens ages 13-19.
Posing as a 13-year-old girl on Aug. 21, a special agent received an unsolicited message from someone using the screen name “Cali M.” The netizen used sexually explicit language and expressed a desire to arrange an in-person meeting.
The next day, “Cali M” gave another name–“John Jay”–and he said he resided in Long Beach. A meeting was set up at Huntington Beach Pier, but as undercover officers waited, no one showed up.
Further OCCETF investigation led agents to suspect “Cali M” was really Kendall, a registered sex offender who had been arrested in Garden Grove in 2007 under similar circumstances. Agents on Sept. 7 went to Kendall's job in Claremont, where he is said to have admitted during an interview to having set up the meeting with the “girl.”
He was arrested without incident on suspicion of contacting a minor online with prior conviction and arranging to meet a minor. He was then taken to Orange County Jail. A search warrant was later served as his Long Beach home.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.