Great Bend murder case shows risks of text messaging

The recent capital murder trial over the killing of a 14-year-old Great Bend girl shows where text messaging can lead.

Jurors heard evidence that a 36-year-old ex-con, Adam Longoria, used cellphone text messages to get Alicia DeBolt’s picture, ask her out, lie about his age, call her “hot stuff” and get her into his SUV the night she disappeared.

The case resonates with a Wichita mother because she has a 14-year-old daughter who texts. The Great Bend case has prompted her to plan to talk to her daughter about the risks, with a conversation that might start something like this: “There could be a time when someone a lot older than you is going to make you feel special,” just as Longoria used text messages to compliment Alicia. The Wichita mother, as with other parents interviewed, asked that her name not be used to protect her daughter’s identity.

Texting is a pervasive – one official calls it “intoxicating” – communication means for young teens partly because it offers their first independence. Through bursts of abbreviated messages tapped on a cellphone pad, they can talk with anyone, anytime, in secret. They can be impulsive.

“Technology makes it easier for predators to prey, and as adults we have to be more cognizant of that,” said Kevin O’Connor, the prosecutor who successfully argued for Longoria’s capital murder conviction.

O’Connor, a special assistant attorney general who is running as a Republican for Sedgwick County district attorney, said he and his wife take a firm approach to monitoring their teens’ texting.

“Don’t ask to look, just do it,” O’Connor said. “My most important job is being a dad, and we’re not shy about looking into our kids’ use of technology. We literally take their phones and look through that, and I make no apologies. You can ask my 16-year-old son.

“It’s not that we don’t trust our kids,” he said. “It’s that we feel it’s our responsibility.”

The mother of the 14-year-old Wichita girl takes a different approach. Her daughter considers the texts private and erases them.

“It’s like reading somebody’s diary,” the mother said. “I don’t invade her privacy.”

So far, her daughter has earned her mother’s trust. But if she ever caught her daughter with her phone in bed – a concern of health experts because some children text into the night when they should be sleeping – she would tighten the rules. One of her existing rules, to help her daughter wind down, is that the girl’s cellphone must stay on a charger in the kitchen beginning at 8 every night.

She didn’t get her daughter a cellphone until she was in sixth grade, after many of her daughter’s friends had cellphones. She got it as a safety measure because her daughter walks home from school, texting her mother when she leaves and gets home.

Teens drawn in

Statistics aren’t available on the number of local cases where suspects use texting to prey on children. But investigators increasingly see technology associated with crimes and find some kind of electronic evidence, including text messages, in an estimated 65 to 70 percent of the cases, said Wichita police Lt. Jeff Weible, commander of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Exploited and Missing Child Unit.

EMCU encourages parents to talk with their children and monitor their phone and online use, and some cellphone providers offer tools for monitoring, Weible said. If a child has a social media account, the parents should have the user name and check on the account periodically, he said.

Sometimes, even when parents try to limit the risks, children find ways to communicate with people who can harm them, as the 2006 killing of pregnant 14-year-old Chelsea Brooks showed. Wichita police homicide Detective Tim Relph, lead investigator in the case, said Chelsea’s parents tried to cut off her communication with Elgin Robinson, the older boyfriend who impregnated her and was convicted along with two other men in her killing. Still, Chelsea managed to set up an instant-message account on a friend’s computer to talk with the boyfriend, Relph said.

Chelsea’s mother, Terri Brooks, said Chelsea used friends’ phones to text back and forth with Robinson even though Brooks told her daughter’s friends she didn’t want Chelsea communicating with him.

Brooks said she followed the Great Bend case and the text-messaging evidence against Longoria and concluded that Longoria was “grooming” Alicia, “just as a predator does. He was drawing her in, trying to get her to trust him.”

Marc Bennett, a Sedgwick County deputy district attorney who also is seeking the Republican nomination for district attorney and who worked with O’Connor to help prosecute Chelsea’s killers, said that for teens, texting has become a “parallel universe they’re living in.”

The attraction of text messaging makes sense, Bennett said, because kids desperately want independence. And the ability of teens to communicate with anyone without their parents’ knowledge is an “intoxicating level of independence,” he said.

When a sex crime against a child is being investigated, “one of the first things we’re going to do is check the kid’s phone,” he said. “Who’s she been communicating with?”

Bennett said parents should have their children show them their texting. “You do have a right to monitor who your kid is communicating with.”

Setting boundaries

Michele Zahner, safety services supervisor with the Wichita school district, said her advice to parents is that if they discover any kind of texting that appears questionable, sexual or threatening, they should not delete it and should report it to law enforcement immediately “and let them handle it.”

Schools generally forbid students from having cellphones on during class, but students still sneak around it, parents say.

“The bottom line,” Zahner said in an e-mail, “is that parents can’t afford to be afraid of the technology, and they have to monitor their kids’ use (what they post online, mobile messages, etc.) just as they would monitor whose house they’re at, or what they’re doing after school.”

Social networks, cellphones and other electronic communication allow people to express affection and allow people to get attention. When you mix that with the “fearlessness associated with adolescence,” it can be a dangerous combination, said Diana Schunn, executive director of the Child Advocacy Center of Sedgwick County, which helps abused children and provides support services to families.

Ongoing communication with children is key, Schunn said, because parents can’t presume their children will always recognize a potentially dangerous situation.

“It doesn’t have to be some fancy sit-down formality of a lecture,” she said.

One mother of three summed up the texting issue this way: “It is a challenge to monitor exactly who they are talking to. I’ll be honest: I don’t always make a regular check. There’s always going to be things they don’t want you to know.”

She tells her children not to give out their phone numbers and tells them it’s OK to block someone from communicating with them.

Another mother, who has a 13-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, has at times set up phone accounts for an extra fee through the cellphone provider that limit their communication to certain times and the phone numbers of trusted people.

Just as cellphones can pose risks, they also offer security, she said. “You can know a lot more of where your kid is. I think that’s a lot of what parents like.” She and her daughter text each other when they get separated while shopping.

She said she relies partly on boundaries she set up with her children beginning when they were in preschool. Still, “that’s not foolproof at all,” she said.

She doesn’t review their messages and struggles with whether she should.

What happened in Great Bend – the text-messaging between the 36-year-old and the 14-year-old that led to murder – got her attention, she said.

“This is making me think.”

This story was originally published April 15, 2012 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Great Bend murder case shows risks of text messaging."