In a brave attempt, a preschool teacher exposed a suspected child sex predator during her two-hour flight from Seattle to San Jose.
As per the report by Washington Post, the woman, whose identity was not revealed, glanced at the text messages of the man sitting in front of her seat on the flight was typing on his smart phone.
It was reported that she could read the messages as they were in large font on a large-screen smart phone.
The woman clicked the photo of the screen of other passenger’s phone and informed airline staff about it who informed the authorities.
Following the information that was given by her to the authorities, two children of 5 and 7 years of age were identified as the potential victims.
According to police, the teacher took the snap of the conversations in which the man was allegedly requesting an individual on the other end to perform sex acts on kids.
As per the report, the police said that if the woman would not have had intervened, the abuse could have gone undetected.
San Jose sex-crimes Detective Nick Jourdenais told the Mercury News that the woman got on a plane as a normal citizen minding her own business, but a couple of hours later, she intervened on quite possibly the most traumatic thing children can go through.
He added that this was life-altering for the kids.
When the plane touched down in San Jose, the police along with the San Francisco-based FBI agents detained 65-year-old Michael Kellar for questioning, the Mercury reported.
While the other accused was identified as a 50-year-old woman named Gail Burnworth. Both Kellar and Burnworth were later arrested.
A new federal complaint describes lurid text messages between an airline passenger and a woman last month discussing performing sex acts on children and drugging the minors to facilitate the abuse, court papers show.
Michael Kellar, 56, and Gail Lynn Burnworth, 50, both of Tacoma, Washington, exchanged the flurry of text messages in July, including on the day Kellar was a passenger aboard a Seattle, Washington-to-San Jose, California, flight on July 31, according to the federal complaint.
A passenger sitting behind Kellar spotted the text messages, took photos of the conversation and alerted authorities. The couple was questioned and arrested.
Kellar has been charged with attempted enticement of a minor and both face a charge of conspiracy to produce child pornography, according to the complaint unsealed Monday.
The complaint lays out the couple’s plans to sexually abuse a 5-year-old and 7-year-old who lived with Burnworth, her ex-husband and his wife. Burnworth, who is not the children’s mother, also promised to take graphic photos and videos at Kellar’s request, the complaint said.
Among Kellar’s requests were videos of molestation, bestiality, fetish behavior involving feces and “kids videos,” the complaint said.
In a July 28 exchange, Kellar asked Burnworth: “Do you really think you can do this or are you just saying this???” the complaint said.
Burnworth responded: “No I think I can do it if I don’t have parents over my shoulder or worried about who’s going to walk in on me. And then on Sunday I will have kids no parents, just kids,” the complaint said.
Authorities were tipped off to the case by a plane passenger who was just trying to look out the window.
As the plane was descending, the woman leaned forward to look out the window in the row ahead of her, The San Jose Mercury News reported. But suddenly another passenger’s phone obstructed her view.
“I don’t know how I saw it, I just saw in big text, ‘child in their underwear,'” the woman told The News. “I thought, ‘What did I just see?’ My heart started racing. Then I could see more texts coming in.”
The woman is not being identified by the newspaper at her request due to safety and privacy concerns.
After seeing the alarming texts, “my instinct just told me to discreetly take some pictures,” she said. “As he kept obsessively looking at the texts, I just decided to snap pictures of texts he was re-reading.”
The woman said she then alerted a flight attendant, who then called police, The News reported.
“I’m being labeled as a hero. I don’t need a bunch of attention. I’m just so thankful the kids are safe,” the woman said, according to The News.