A parent's worst Internet nightmare nearly came true in Chesapeake when a man took a bus 2,500 miles to meet a 13-year-old girl he had met on the social networking Web site MySpace, authorities said this week.
Plus, he had a return bus ticket in the girl's name, a federal agent said Tuesday.
After hearing explicit details of the alleged crime, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered Jesse Lee Wise, a 2 5-year-old door-to-door salesman from Nevada, jailed without bond pending grand jury action.
Wise had set up a tent in a wooded area by the Chesapeake library on Cedar Road, not far from the girl's house, and sent her sexually explicit messages through the library's computer, according to court records and testimony.
In a sting operation, Chesapeake police and the State Police arrested Wise on July 17 at the library, while Wise believed he was chatting with the girl over the computer. By that time, he was actually chatting with an undercover trooper.
Wise was initially charged in state court, but the case was taken federally last week on a charge of trying to entice a minor across state lines for sex.
The girl had been having online and telephone conversations with Wise once or twice a week for about 1-1/2 years, a federal agent said Tuesday.
"Where were her parents to allow her MySpace page to have her personal identifying information?" U.S. Magistrate Judge Tommy E. Miller asked in court Tuesday.
The girl, who has not been publicly identified, had her real name and age on her page.
In May this year, as the conversations between Wise and the girl became sexual, the girl reported the relationship to her mother, who called State Police, Paul Wolpert, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, testified.
"She started getting uncomfortable with the conversations," Wolpert said. Wise, he said, "was pressing her to meet him."
At the time of his arrest on state charges, Wise told a WAVY television reporter in a jailhouse interview that he thought the girl was 19. Wise's attorney raised that point again in federal court Tuesday.
Wolpert said that he believed Wise knew the girl was 13. He cited this July 7 MySpace conversation between Wise and the undercover trooper posing as the girl:
"I'm 13," the trooper told Wise.
"I know how old you are just don't type it on here cause I am in a public place," Wise replied.
He also promised her a ring and told her he would take her back to Arizona to live. Wise has lived in both Arizona and Nevada, where he has a 1-year-old son.
Wise arrived in Norfolk on July 14, took a public bus to Chesapeake and set up his tent outside the library.
According to the court records, he asked the girl to meet him at the library and said that she would recognize him by his dragon/barbed wire tattoo on his left arm.
"Well baby, I am in the tent and it is in the woods as you walk out the front doors," he wrote to her the day before his arrest.
During a search of the tent, authorities discovered new and used condoms, a ring with a pink heart and two Greyhound bus tickets to Arizona, one in the girl's name, Wolpert said.
MySpace officials have said that they have installed stringent controls to weed out online sexual predators.
As of February, 90,000 registered sex offenders were removed from MySpace. Wise is not a registered sex offender.