Parents want all sex offenders to be posted on state’s Web site

Jen Lawson

Friday, July 16, 2004 | 10:53 a.m.

Steve McNeill took children to the Nellis Arms apartment complex pool just about every day, playing games with them in the water, parents said.

A mother thought it was strange that McNeill regularly offered to buy her 8-year-old daughter ice cream and Happy Meals, but she didn't think he had ulterior motives.

Nobody knew McNeill, 39, was a convicted sex offender.

After a 6-year-old girl told her mother last week that McNeill had kissed her, details emerged of alleged abuse of other girls in the complex, and Metro Police arrested McNeill on July 9.

His prior offense was determined not to be serious enough to be posted on Nevada's sex offender registry Web site. According to state law, only information on the most dangerous offenders is made public.

The parents of the victims said this needs to change.

"The only mistake I made was letting him take my daughter to the pool," the 31-year-old mother of one of the alleged victims said. The Sun is withholding the names of the parents to protect the identity of the victims.

"I think the public should be notified about all sex offenders, no matter what the crime is," she said.

McNeill, who worked for a moving company, began living at the Nellis Arms complex at 4320 N. Las Vegas Blvd. near Nellis Boulevard in March.

About a month later, the parent of a 9-year-old girl told the apartment manager that McNeill lifted up her shirt while inside his first-floor apartment.

"We advised him not to let kids in his apartment," manager Cathy Larsen said. Police weren't called and other residents weren't told because there were doubts about the girl's story.

After that, she made McNeill move from his poolside apartment to one across the courtyard on the outside of the building.

Another manager, Jim Gaughan, said McNeill was moved so he could have McNeill's apartment, but neighbors are skeptical about the apartment management's handling of McNeill.

"They saw him at the pool all the time with my daughter even after the warning and they didn't say anything," a mother said.

The mother of the 6-year-old girl told police that recently her daughter walked past McNeill's open apartment door on her way to play with a friend and he asked her to come in.

She was wearing a bathing suit with a nightgown over it and McNeill "made a comment that she would look much better without her nightgown on," the report says.

Her mother came looking for her and the girl told her what McNeill said. McNeill denied it, the mother said.

Last week, the girl told her mother that McNeill kissed her in the pool.

The mother became alarmed and asked her neighbor, who has an 8-year-old girl, if he had done anything inappropriately to her daughter. McNeill often played with the 8-year-old in the pool, the police report says.

When questioned by her mother, the 8-year-old said McNeill had been touching her genitals while swimming. The alleged abuse began about a month ago, the girl told police, and she didn't tell anyone because she was afraid she would get in trouble.

McNeill told neighbors that he has kids but they live somewhere else and he missed them. The parents thought that was why he spent so much time around children.

Things that McNeill had said to her in the past just clicked, the girl's mother said: How wanted to babysit her free of charge (the mother turned him down), how he had two video game systems -- which children love -- in his apartment, how he wanted to buy her treats.

"He always commented on my daughter's shape and said how pretty she is," she said. "We went to the manager's office and told them (about the allegations) and they said, 'Oh no, not again."'

Larsen, however, said McNeill "never gave anybody any indication that he would do anything to a child. If I had sensed something I would have jumped on it."

Police were called and McNeill denied the allegations but said he might have touched them inappropriately by accident.

He told police "he is a sucker and that he puts himself near children," the report says.

Police placed McNeill under arrest for sexual assault of a victim under 14, failure to register as a sex offender and two counts of lewdness with a minor.

He is scheduled to be arraigned July 19.

Court records show he was convicted of attempted lewdness in California in 1987. Anyone convicted of a sex offense must notify local law enforcement of their address and McNeill had not done that, police said.

Not only were the police unaware that McNeill was living in Nevada, information on his prior offense was not available to the public because it was deemed minor.

Only Tier 2 and Tier 3 sex offenders, ones with a moderate and probable chance of committing future offenses, are on the state's sex offender registry Web site, www.nvsexoffenders.gov.

State law requires police to notify schools as well as religious and youth organizations of Tier 2 offenders, but the community in general is only notified in cases of the more serious so-called Tier 3 offenders.

But McNeill's offense 17 years ago is a Tier 1 offense, meaning he was a low-risk offender. According to state law, nothing relating to Tier 1 offenders can be disclosed to the public.

Donna Coleman, president of the Children's Advocacy Alliance, a Henderson-based organization that aims to protect children from abuse and neglect, pointed out that Tier 1 offenders might have been accused of more serious offenses but pleaded guilty to something lesser in order to get shorter prison terms.

But, she said, "in all fairness to the people who are peeping toms or a 21-year-old having sex with a 17-year-old, you have to draw the line somewhere."

Even if McNeill's prior Tier 1 offense had been made public, it likely would be sealed by now, given that information on the more serious Tier 2 offenders is sealed 10 years after the conviction.

"Maybe as time went by, he got worse," one of the mothers said.

Gaughan, one of the apartment complex managers, said if they had known McNeill was a convicted sex offender "we would have taken a closer look at him."

Studies suggest that recidivism for sex offenders is high, Coleman said, but there aren't many hard statistics and they don't get caught often.

But that wasn't the case last week, when a concerned mother checked the state's sex offender Web site and discovered the uncle of her 13-year-old son's playmate in Southern Highlands was a convicted sex offender.

Shawn Massey, 37, was convicted in 1996 in California of molesting three children. When he moved to Nevada, authorities designated Massey as a Tier 2 offender.

Police arrested Massey on more than 50 counts of molestation in connection with the 13-year-old boy.

Neighbors expressed concern that Massey wasn't considered a serious enough sex offender to warrant community notification.

The mothers of McNeill's alleged victims fear that he will post his $23,000 bail, get released from the Clark County Detention Center and return to his apartment.

But Larsen said McNeill won't be moving back: She has already started the eviction process.

Meanwile his alleged victims have been having nightmares, their mothers said, and they plan to seek counseling for them.

"I'd like to see him locked up for life," one of the mothers said.