SURPRISE — Experts on child exploitation are all too familiar with sex offenders working as scout leaders, coaches and teachers, but this was a new one — a boyish-looking man who posed as a 12-year-old and enrolled in school in what may have been a scheme to find kids to molest.
Now parents in this Phoenix suburb where 29-year-old Neil Havens Rodreick II attended a charter school for four months are asking their children if they had any contact with this "classmate."
And police are interviewing parents, students and teachers, and checking at least three other Arizona schools where Rodreick, a convicted sex offender from Oklahoma, also enrolled.
"We told him that it was a scary man who passed himself off as a kid that went to school for a bit," said Erika Ton Loy, whose 7-year-old son attends the charter school, the Imagine School. "When we heard more about it on the news, we got him up out of bed. My husband wanted to make sure he didn't recognize this guy, and he was like, 'Have you seen this guy?' and he said, 'No, I don't know who the heck he is.' "
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Rodreick — who is about 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds, shaved his body hair and used makeup in a not-entirely-convincing attempt to cover his stubble — has been charged with forgery and fraud in the school-enrollment con, as well as assault against a girl. But investigators have refused to release details of that crime and will not say whether he met the girl through the school scam.
Officials also said Thursday that a search of the home where he was staying yielded a video of Rodreick engaging in sex acts with an unidentified child.
Using the name Casey Price, Rodreick attended seventh grade at the Imagine School from August to November before he was thrown out for poor attendance.
Investigators said he was caught when he attended school for a day last week in Chino Valley, about 90 miles from Phoenix.
On Jan. 9, Rodreick also enrolled as Casey Price at YCFA Achieve Academy, a charter school in Prescott Valley, about 75 miles from Phoenix, said Amy Rezzonico, a spokeswoman at the Arizona Department of Education. It was unclear whether he attended school there.
Officials at the Prescott Valley school declined to comment.
Rodreick also was enrolled at a charter school as a seventh-grader for a few weeks in 2005 in Payson, about 65 miles from Phoenix, investigators said. Rodreick, who used the name Casey Rodreick there, did not provide the school with all the proper paperwork, said Detective George Ratliff of the Gila County Sheriff's Office.
After the school persisted in trying to obtain the paperwork, Rodreick withdrew from the school, which he attended nine of the 21 days he was enrolled there. Ratliff said there is no evidence any of the children there were victimized.
Rodreick, who is in jail, declined a request for an interview.
