The Shadow
Covington Va (Virginian Review) – Luckily for everyone in and around The Alleghany Highlands Eddie Worth from the “Safe Surfin Foundation” recently contacted leaders of the Covington Moose Lodge and the Alleghany County Sheriff’s office about helping them with their ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) program. Safe Surfin is a Foundation that has been working with different law enforcement agencies since 1998. Sheriff Mike Brown
of Bedford County Virginia started it to instruct children and parents about online safety.
Sheriff Brown started the group as he became increasingly aware of the fact that not everything to do with the “internet” was a good thing.
Predators were using it to seek out children for illegal purposes. Since then, the group has grown to have educational programs in all fifty states. The Foundation has developed a close working relationship with The Moose Organization over the last sixteen years, and relied on them for things, such as financial support and help with programs like “cop in a box” where they raise money to donate computers to law enforcement that are specially designed for the purpose of tracking down and catching internet predators.
Through hard work and dedication, the Covington Moose Lodge was able to raise the $3000 needed to purchase and donate one of the Safe Surfin Foundations specially made laptops. A small ceremony was held at the Alleghany County Sheriff’s office on Monday, July 29 in which Eddie Worth from the Safe Surfin Foundation and representatives from the Covington Moose Lodge donated one of the powerful machines to Alleghany Investigators. In a short statement Worth briefly discussed the important work done at the foundation and applauded the efforts of the Covington Moose Lodge. He gave information on the ever-present threat to children on the internet by informing everyone that at any given time its estimated that there are around 500,000 predators searching the web Eddie Worth shared that offenders come from every walk of life from Lawyers and Judges to an Ace combat training pilot that had a wife and three children of his own. There’s really no way to know who is going to secretly be a pedophile behind closed doors, which is what makes the work of these computers and investigators so important. It takes time to compile the evidence necessary to guarantee a conviction. He was happy to share that of the little over one hundred arrests made in Virginia using the special computers they have a 100% conviction rate in court.
Recently released information from the Alleghany Sheriff’s office suggests that investigators wasted no time putting their new asset to work On August 2 investigators began talking to a man now known to be James A. Janis, while pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl. Janis had sexually explicit conversations expressing what he wanted from the young teen. More than once he talked about other underage girls he was interested in and even shared the young girl’s pictures and the things he wanted to do with them. multiple conversations revealed that he lived in Lawton Oklahoma. After accruing enough evidence, the Alleghany Sheriff’s Office contacted the Oklahoma bureau of investigations informing them of their investigation. In an act of State cooperation an Alleghany County investigator flew to Lawton and assisted in serving a search warrant and eventually an arrest warrant on Janis. He is currently behind bars and faces 25 years to life for his crimes. Alleghany County’s Sheriff Moore is pleased with his team’s hard work and thanked all agencies involved. He also said that “this could easily have happened here in Alleghany County. It is our intent to put an end to violent crime that is directed towards our children in Alleghany County.”
