Sex offender accused of attacking boy was off the grid

By Thom Jensen KATU News, The Associated Press and KATU.com Staff Published: Jul 3, 2012 at 6:26 PM PDT Last Updated: Jul 3, 2012 at 9:00 PM PDT
Sex offender accused of attacking boy was off the grid »Play Video
Adam Lee Brown enters court Monday.

PORTLAND, Ore. - Probation officials knew the sex offender accused of attacking a 10-year-old boy in a fast-food restaurant over the weekend was not where he was supposed to be before the alleged attack, according to a community corrections manager Tuesday.

But the problem of finding 49-year-old Adam Lee Brown stemmed from the vast area that needed to be searched, the manager said – which were about 466 square miles and nearly three quarters of a million different faces.

Brown was supposed to be at the Henry Building in downtown Portland. A probation official said officers did go there looking for Brown when he did not report to his probation officer as scheduled. And as they expected, Brown was nowhere to be found.

On June 14 they put out a warrant asking for police help but no one found him until police said he attacked the boy in the restroom of Wendy's restaurant in Northeast Portland just down the street from KATU on Sandy Boulevard.

The HIV-positive son of a church pastor, Brown was convicted in 1993 of three counts of first-degree sodomy, each involving a child. He pleaded no contest to reduced charges - the initial charges included attempted murder because of his HIV.

Brown received a sentence of 16 years but he only served 11 years.

The Douglas County district attorney at the time said he agreed to the 16-year sentence because he was certain Brown would die from AIDS in prison since he already had HIV.

On Monday night Brown's ex-wife, Nancy Plambaeck, told KATU News she was never happy about the sentence Brown got.

"He needs to die; he needed to die a long time ago," she said. "It's just the nightmare that never ends until he dies."

On Tuesday, Plambaeck said Brown violated his probation numerous times since he was released in 2004. In fact, in 2005 she said he confronted a little girl in Roseburg and then had a relationship with a 17-year-old. But he never was sent back to prison.

She said she got at least a dozen notices from victims' rights advocates after Brown's release in 2004 telling her he was in trouble again.

So how did Brown get out so early? Simply put, it was the timing of his arrest.

First, in 1989, Oregon probation and parole laws changed and the state parole board could no longer keep people locked up based on the details of their crimes. In 1995, Oregonians passed tougher Measure 11 sentencing guidelines that would have allowed a jury to put Brown away for the rest of his life. But Brown was arrested in 1992 – basically caught between the two laws, according to the parole board’s executive director.

By 2007, Brown was kicked out of a halfway house and was only occasionally taking his psychiatric medication, according to state parole board documents. An automated score generated by parole officials assigned Brown a risk score of 2, relatively low.
   
By 2009, that risk score was increased to 4, and Brown again faced a jail sentence, this time 90 days, for a host of infractions, from marijuana use to associating with people under 18 and furnishing alcohol to people under the legal drinking age.
   
His probation officer described her concern.
   
"It is of great concern that although Mr. Brown is engaging in sexual relations with persons over 18 that he is providing alcohol to these persons," wrote the officer, Tesa Mann. "I have great concerns regarding his behavior and believe these behaviors put the community at great risk."
   
By 2010, his offender risk score was at 8. He went into a bar - forbidden by the terms of his supervision - and spent almost one month in jail.
   
He then moved to Multnomah County. His supervision officer, Tracey Madsen, expressed concerns about his behavior. He was lying, she said, and gambling away his Social Security check on video poker. Madsen said she found pornography, another violation of his supervised release. He spent another month in jail.
   
His most recent jail stint, from Jan. 15 to April 13 of this year, came after a host of charges, including first-degree burglary. Brown entered a Portland U.S. Veteran's Affairs clinic and grew irate when he was asked to leave the facility for being disruptive.
   
Police and Brown's parole officer believe he then hid in a bathroom at the clinic and waited until staff left, then trashed the area and his case manager's office. Police found a duffel bag Brown brought with him in the clinic, along with medical papers with his name on them.
   
When he was arrested on Jan. 15, Brown demanded his arresting officer deliver a message to Madsen, which Madsen said the officer took down verbatim. The expletive-filled rant ends with, "You will never see me again except possibly in the media."

Brown had an ankle bracelet on during the arrest involving the 17-year-old, but he did not get one of those tracking bracelets when he came to Portland in 2011.

A spokesman for Multnomah County said the case is being reviewed right now to see if probation and parole or community corrections in the county could have or should have done more.

Brown appeared in court Monday, facing charges of attempted murder, sexual assault, assault and kidnapping. The boy he allegedly attacked was released from the hospital Tuesday.

The boy's family released a statement through police Tuesday night thanking the public for its support:

"You cannot begin to imagine the horror we have been through in the past couple of days. Our son is going through a lot and we as a family are committed to letting our little boy heal in peace. Thank you for all your concerns, but in these troubling times, we are asking for people to respect the privacy of our entire family."

Associated Press reporter Nigel Duara contributed to this report.