Sex Offenders: Where They Work
They work near your children. You even let them into your home. What you don’t know is that they are registered sex offenders. News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter Brian Collister uncovered where hundreds of area sex offenders are working here in San Antonio, and you won’t believe the jobs some are doing.
“Karate was my life,” Shauna Murphy explained to the Trouble Shooters. It was everything to her while growing up in Midland, but her memories include what she said were years of abuse at the hands of her karate instructor.
“I knew in my gut that something happened that wasn’t right,” Murphy told us. She said Tony Lopez became like a father to her, even using his little star pupil to help teach classes. Late one night on the way back from a karate class when she was eight years old, Shauna said she was starting to fall asleep.
She recalled, “He says, ‘You can lay your head in my lap.’ You know…[at] eight, I didn’t think of anything, so I did, and I was going to go to sleep, and I was just about to sleep when it happened. He instructed me on what to do.”
According to Murphy, the abuse went on for years with Lopez warning her that if she told, he would go to jail and she would not be able to take karate anymore.
Murphy said it happened “from the time [when] I was eight until I was about 14 was just sexual abuse. In the car. In the back of the studio. At his house while his wife was sleeping.” As a teenager, she eventually told her story to police. Lopez pled guilty in 1990 to sexual assault of a child, and received deferred adjudication, which means he avoided prison time. He eventually moved to San Antonio where he and his family runs Family Martial Arts. It teaches karate to kids at two locations one on Hausman and one on Mainland.
Trouble Shooter Brian Collister asked Lopez, “[Do] you tell all your parents?”
Lopez responded, “Most of them know, if they ask.”
Collister followed up, “If they ask? Why would they ask?”
Lopez said, “Because I’m registered and it’s a public thing.”
Karate students and parents we spoke with outside of a Family Martial Arts location were stunned by the news because they did not know. One parent said, “I think it’s strange that somebody who is a registered sex offender would run something like that.”
Lopez did bring us a parent who said she knew. “He was very honest with my family and we have continued to remain here and we love it here, we’re not taking our kids out.”
Lopez denied ever sexually abusing Shauna and insisted he only pled guilty because he could not afford to continue fighting the charge after his first trial ended in a hung jury. He said he does not give individual instruction anymore and is never alone with any of the students.
Murphy still had this warning: “If somebody says, ‘I need to get my kid out of that school,’ do it, or don’t let them be alone with him because it can happen again.”
Finding out if a sex offender lives near you is easy. It’s posted on the internet, but where they work was not public information, until now. The Trouble Shooters obtained for the first time a list showing where every sex offender in the state works. The Attorney General recently ruled that the Department of Public Safety must now release where a sex offender works and what they do.
Some of the jobs they do will shock you, including jobs that give them access to your children or to your home. For example, we found people who work as locksmiths who changes your locks, movers who you let in to pick up your furniture, and the carpet cleaner you invite into your home.
http://www.woai.com/mostpopular/story.aspx?content_id=a9b0cd41-ed57-44f9-8f35-2d49166974bc
Full article at link, continues onto more stories of offenders working in public places.