A man in Illinois placed a lurid ad for casual sex using a 14-year-old girl’s number as an act of revenge over some text messages sent to the wrong phone number.
Naperville resident Timothy J. Johnson, 34, used Craigslist to harass a young girl whose mother accidentally sent text messages and photos intended for her daughter and some friends to his number. Via the Naperville Sun:
Naperville police began investigating Johnson on June 15, after being contacted by the girl’s mother. […] The woman, in a written statement, told police she had taken a photograph the morning of June 5 of the 14-year-old and her best friend, on their last day of school. The woman said she sent copies of the photo via text a short time later to her daughter and some of the girl’s friends, “along with some other messages, congratulating her on a good school year,” the statement read.
After her daughter failed to respond to the messages, “I looked at my phone, to see if the texts went through,” the woman said. The woman told police she thought one of the recipients was a friend of her daughter, but then learned the friend had changed his number without telling the girl.
Realizing she had sent the photo and messages to a stranger’s cell phone, the woman said she sent a follow-up text to that number, in which she apologized for her error, according to her statement. Her daughter, too, tried to apologize that afternoon via text to the recipient of the wayward messages, the statement indicated.
But instead of chalking it up to an innocent mistake, authorities said Johnson began to harass the girl, wanting to “give her a taste of her own medicine.” He first left a voicemail that terrified her, “calling her names and swearing, and telling her to stop sending him texts of girls’ photos…” He called so many times, the girl’s mother eventually had his number blocked.
That’s when Johnson, the son of a retired police officer, posted an ad in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist Chicago, giving out the teen’s number and pretending it was for a 19-year-old woman looking for sex.
She was flooded with phone calls and text messages, including pornographic images from men. The girl’s mother contacted police:
The investigation eventually led to Johnson, who Oct. 23 placed a phone call to the police detective overseeing the case. Johnson began that conversation by telling the detective “he was not going to lie to me,” according to police records. Johnson “related he did remember getting the phone calls on his phone,” records showed. He said he had “received numerous calls from little girls, (and) he wanted it to stop.”
[…]
(Johnson) related, in hindsight, he should not have done that to a 14-year-old girl.”
Again—all of this over some text messages to the wrong phone number. Johnson pleaded guilty to electronic harassment using an obscene message was given a year of probation, with the stipulation that he never contact the girl again.
Image via Shutterstock.
