Corra Newsboy - Background Checks

Who's Running Your Child's Daycare Center?

We found this article on CNN Online.
Alabama officials say Karr was licensed for home daycare

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) -- John Mark Karr bragged to his landlord's family that "sexually, I am like a wolf," and said he preferred girls to women when he worked in Costa Rica as an English teacher, his former housemates told The Associated Press.

Karr, now jailed in Los Angeles after his arrest in Thailand, is named in a Colorado warrant as a suspect in the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.

Karr traveled around the world in recent years, including brief stays in Honduras and Costa Rica, where he rented a room in 2004 from Canadian John Hall, who teaches at a private university in the capital of San Jose.

Hall, 42, told AP in an exclusive interview that he rented a room to Karr through an Internet posting, but asked him to leave after about five weeks because Karr was saying "rude and inappropriate things" to his Costa Rican wife and stepdaughters, then 16 and 20.

"I threw him out because he was causing problems for them," Hall said.

One stepdaughter, now 22, told AP that Karr said several times that he liked girls.

Odd conversation

"My mother asked him whether he was looking for a girlfriend in Costa Rica and he answered that he didn't like adult women, only small ones," she said, speaking on condition her name not be published. "I thought he meant young women, and never imagined he meant girls."

During his stay with the family, Karr would often either talk incessantly, or sit in his room and listen to dark rock music, like that of Marilyn Manson, something that also bothered the Halls, who are Pentecostal Christians.

After kicking Karr out, Hall remained suspicious enough to do a computer search to see if he was a sex predator.

"I suspected he was a pedophile. I looked on the Internet to see if there was something on him, but I didn't find anything," he said.

The following year, Karr taught for eight months at a small primary school in La Esperanza, Honduras, 60 miles from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, a former co-worker said.

Renan Marquez said Karr taught second grade, but left because he had a contract with a school in another country; he didn't know which. Marquez told the AP by telephone that Karr was always "reserved, shy, responsible, organized and punctual."

Karr "required a lot of discipline" of his second-grade English students, Marquez said. "I never saw anything strange in his treatment of the children."

Alabama daycare license

Meanwhile, Alabama welfare agency officials said Thursday that Karr kept children at a home day-care center he operated in northwest Alabama.

The Marion County Department of Human Resources issued a license for Karr to begin operating a day-care out of his rural home in June 1997, said John Bradford, a spokesman with the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

He said the sheriff's department conducted a background check before the license was issued and no problems were found.

Karr didn't receive any complaints before the two-year license expired in 1999, Bradford told The Associated Press.

"We do know he kept children, but it is really hard to get a handle on the number," he said.

Karr, 41, has said he was with JonBenet when she was killed in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado, in December 1996, but he called her death an accident. (Full story)

Karr was living with his ex-wife in Hamilton at the time of the slaying.

Karr, who was working as a teacher, was arrested last week in Bangkok, Thailand, and flown Sunday to the United States. He is being held in Los Angeles, California.

He has agreed not to fight his transfer to Colorado to face charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault of a child in connection with the December 26, 1996 slaying of the child beauty pageant competitor.

While we find the entire Jon Benet murder episode particularly loathesome, we had to point out his ugly example of why you should be running a background check on anyone who is working near your home or who has charge of your children for any amount of time, yet alone the better part of the day.

Apparently Karr was cleared by Alabama for a license. The Sheriff's department claimed they ran a background check and nothing of consequence registered on the reports. Karr may well have slipped through the cracks on that one. His pedophilliac proclivities also went undiscovered as a teacher. While unfortunate, it is understandable. He had not yet been charged with any crime and, from the official perspective, he had not come under suspicion.
But, overall, the best way to avoid entrusting your children with the wrong people is to run a criminal background check, and include with it a check of the registry of sexual offenders. Every state has a crimnal registery, and so do certain counties. Most sexual registries will report to a central system. While nothing in life is absolute, this criminal background check and the sexual registry are pretty thorough and extremely comprehensive.

Corra always pairs the Sexual Offender's Registry with the Nationwide Criminal Database Search. We do it as part of our pre-employment screening package, because the last thing we need is to help put a sexual offender in the work place. This search is convenient, cost effective, and it returns quickly. If you are a parent about to put your child into daycare, it's the least you can do for your child's safety.

Check them out before you trust them.

posted by Nicholas Gustavson @ 3:39 PM