One Survivor's Crusade Reveals a Plague of Errors in Nation's Sex Offender Registries

Estimates of the number of entries with crucial mistakes run into the tens of thousands. One man—and pretty much only one man—is trying to fix them.




http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/04/17/errors-sexual-offender-registries

April 17, 2015 By Steve Friess

Steve Friess has written for Politico and The New York Times. He teaches journalism at Michigan State University.

Tim isher steps slowly up the driveway, glancing back with mournful eyes a few times toward his sister-in-law across the street, silently pleading for her encouragement. With neat, shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache, dressed in a plaid button-down shirt and shapeless jeans, Fisher is 49, but in his mind he’s the cherub-cheeked boy with the sun-bleached bangs who walked this asphalt hundreds of times, every Saturday for seven years. Today he trembles with the same trepidation that his boyhood self felt.

By the time he reaches the doorstep, he feels a strange, unsettling vulnerability in being shadowed and hidden from street view by a red-tile overhang. This is his decision, his right, he reminds himself. He just drove five hours from his Las Vegas home to this quiet block in Anaheim, California, fruitlessly trying to release his gathering anxiety with cigarette after cigarette as his sister-in-law soothed him with assurances that she was there for him, come what may.

Now he stands there for a bit, under the overhang, immobilized by a kaleidoscopic clutter of memories. He sees the unsuspecting look on his mother’s face as the man who lives here, Ernie Schwobeda, drops by to pick him up to do Schwobeda’s yard work. Feel blessed, Fisher hears his mother telling him, that a man of God has taken such a personal interest in you. He remembers the sound of the Saturday-morning cartoons, blaring from the TV inside the house he now stands before, which his mom wouldn’t have allowed him to watch. He can taste the ice cream and candy he wasn’t supposed to be eating—before noon, no less—all of it bribes in exchange for his participation and secrecy. He spots the top of the backyard tree where he hid that one time. Even as Schwobeda yelled furiously for him to return, young Tim only emerged from behind the branches after Schwobeda’s wife, Mabel, came home.

It’s a lot to take in, and he needs to steady himself now that he’s at the door after all of these years. This is the moment he has worked toward for decades, that he has rehearsed countless times in every tone. Angry. Sad. Threatening. Pleading.


Tim Fisher holds a photograph of himself taken around the time the years of abuse he suffered began.
(Photo: Denise Truscello)

FULL story at link.