Woman arrested in molestation of 3-year-old boy

Jen Lawson

Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2004 | 11:08 a.m.

Metro Police arrested a 31-year-old Las Vegas woman on charges of molesting a 3-year-old boy, a situation experts said is unusual.

Just over 2 percent of the nearly 9,000 convicted sexually oriented offenders in Nevada's database are women, according to Daryl Riersgard, manager of the state's sex offender registry.

Carla Harris is scheduled to appear in court this morning on charges of sexual assault of a victim under 14 and lewdness of a minor. She was arrested Thursday.

Police say in the arrest report that Harris "is an old sexual acquaintance" of the boy's father. He sometimes visits Harris at the Klondike hotel-casino, where she had been living.

In June the father went to see Harris and brought his son along. The father fell asleep, the report says, leaving his son in Harris' care.

Over the next few days the boy asked his mother and grandmother if they wanted to play a game, then began acting out what police believed to be his alleged sexual abuse.

The boy told his mother that he told Harris "to stop because it hurt" but she didn't, the arrest report says.

His mother took him to Sunrise Hospital and a test showed there was evidence of probable abuse, and the police paperwork says "the child gives a clear, consistent, detailed description of molestation."

The boy's father told detectives that Harris told him once that she served time in Illinois for child molestation, police said.

Police ran a check and found that Harris was a registered sex offender and had been convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a victim aged 13 to 16, according to police. The Illinois sex offender database classified Harris as a sexual predator, police said.

The boy picked Harris' picture out of a photographic lineup, the report says, and told police she was the one who had touched him.

In an interview with police, Harris allegedly said she was arrested in Illinois when she was 25 for having sex with a 16-year-old boy, and that she served 18 months of a four-year prison sentence.

She denied touching the 3-year-old boy and refused to take a polygraph test.

Sex offenders are so overwhelmingly male, Riersgard said, that "when we refer to sex offenders we tend to put it in the 'he' context," he said.

As of Monday just 191 -- or 2.2 percent -- of Nevada's 8,983 registered sex offenders were women.

Only a handful of women have been in the Clark County court system on sex offenses in the past year or so and most have involved children older than Harris' alleged victim.

For example, Marlene Hazel, 32, a teacher's assistant at Gordon McCaw Elementary School in Henderson, was arrested in June on charges of having sex with a 14-year-old neighbor.

She is scheduled to be arraigned Sept. 8 on two counts of statutory sexual seduction.

And in January, 32-year-old Marjorie Denee Escareno was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences for sexually assaulting two children.

Escareno had claimed her religious beliefs commanded her to perform sexual acts with the 11-year-old boy and 9-year-old girl. She was arrested in March 2003.