.A convicted sex offender has returned to live in the town he was driven out of last month after an arsonist burned his house. The man, Joseph Gallardo, 35, registered Friday as a sex offender at the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, said Elliott Woodall, a spokesman for the office. Two television crews and a few relatives accompanied Mr. Gallardo.
Washington State law requires sex offenders to register with the sheriff's department in the county where they plan to live. Mr. Gallardo was released from prison on July 12 after serving almost three years for statutory rape of a 10-year-old girl.
Before his planned move to Lynnwood, north of Seattle, the sheriff's office took advantage of a provision in state law and sent out fliers warning residents that a child-rapist would be living in the town.
The leaflets said Mr. Gallardo had a "very high probability of reoffense." Neighbors responded with picketing and rallies. The morning of Mr. Gallardo's release, the house in which he intended to live was set afire.
Mr. Gallardo now plans to live with relatives about five miles north of the house that burned, Mr. Woodall said. ..more.. : by NY Times
Protests Force Sex Offender To Move From Second Town
7-20-1993 Washington:
A sex offender who was burned out of his house in Washington State has left this rural community under pressure from residents.
The man, 35-year-old Joseph P. Gallardo, came to Deming last week to live with his brother Pierre. Mr. Gallardo, who had been convicted in the rape of a 10-year-old girl in Washington, had left that state after a protest rally and suspected arson fire at the house he was about to move into near Lynnwood, a suburb of Seattle.
On Sunday both Gallardo brothers left Deming, a town of 11,000 people in southwestern New Mexico, ahead of about 100 residents staging a protest. Protesters March to House
The demonstrators marched from a school to the Gallardo house carrying placards that read: "Washington Doesn't Want You, Neither Does Deming" and "Gallardo Go Home."
When the marchers reached the house, they found it surrounded by police officers, including Chief Michael Carillo, who told them that the brothers had left.
Pierre Gallardo, a 50-year-old merchant who said he was a minister for the Unity Church of the Desert, told KING-TV, a television station in Seattle, that he and his brother were leaving Deming for good, but he did not say where they were going. There was no listing for such a church in the Deming telephone directory.
Joseph Gallardo, recently released from prison after serving two years and 10 months of a four-year sentence, had hoped to learn a trade and get counseling, his brother said. Mr. Gallardo had had no prior sex-offense convictions and his sentence was reduced for good behavior.
But Deming residents bombarded the authorities with angry telephone calls, Chief Carillo said.
The reaction had been even stronger in Washington. Before Mr. Gallardo left prison, law-enforcement officials distributed fliers in Lynnwood warning of his arrival, in keeping with state law.
They described him as "an extremely dangerous untreated sex offender with a very high probability for re-offense." The flier added that Mr. Gallardo had "sadistic and deviant sexual fantasies which included torture, sexual assault, human sacrifice, bondage and the murder of young children."
Hundreds rallied to protest his release. On the morning he got out of prison, the house he was to move into was set afire. There have been no arrests in the case.
Mr. Gallardo's victim, now 16 and living in Florida with her mother, said Sunday in a newspaper interview that her assailant was now being unfairly persecuted.
"I think they are torturing him," she told The Seattle Times. "I don't think he deserves it."
"I think he's learned his lesson," she added. "I don't think he would probably touch another child again." ..News Source.. by NY Times
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