Utah
Civilian group ‘Predator Poachers’ confronts repeat sex offender at Utah halfway house
SALT LAKE CITY — A repeat sex offender who was getting another chance at freedom is back behind bars after a civilian predator hunter group confronted him inside a halfway house in Salt Lake City.
Predator Poachers, the group run by Alex Rosen, baits online predators using “decoy accounts” set up to look like online profiles belonging to minors. They then travel from state to state confronting their “catches,” filming the confrontations to post content online, then calling local law enforcement in the hopes they’ll make an arrest.
At the end of March, Rosen and his team arrived in Utah and filmed confrontations with four men including Chase Quinton, 37, who had recently been granted parole and was living in a Utah Department of Corrections community correctional center, or halfway house.
As the KSL Investigators have reported, predator hunter groups present a unique challenge for law enforcement. Officials never want to encourage civilians getting involved in confronting potentially violent criminals. At the same time, Predator Poachers is regularly credited with stopping would-be sex crimes against children.
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“I’ve got a package here for ya,” Rosen is heard in Predator Poachers’ video as Quinton responds to the lobby of the halfway house.
“He came down for his package, and in the lobby I interviewed him for like 15 minutes in hushed tones, and he admitted he was communicating to underage kids online and downloading apps he was not allowed to have on parole,” Rosen told the KSL Investigators.
During the confrontation, corrections officers can be seen walking through the background of the video. At one point, Rosen zooms in on the large Utah Department of Corrections logo on the wall behind Quinton, telling him, “Literally being in the Department of Corrections’ custody, you cannot be texting underage kids.”
After Quinton admitted to sending the messages on camera, Rosen involved a nearby corrections officer who immediately confiscated the parolee’s phone.
“It was, like, ‘We caught him in the halfway house!’ He was messaging two fake decoy accounts he believed were two underage kids,” Rosen told KSL. “And he wanted one of them to sneak out of their house in his mind and meet him.”
‘We would have caught it’
Quinton was returned to custody on a parole violation and is currently at the Salt Lake County Jail.
“He was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison,” said Spencer Turley, deputy executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections.
Turley said the department is grateful it was Predator Poachers — and not real children — on the other end of those messages.
“One of the things that we would ask is that they, rather than just outright confronting the person, is bring it to us first, so that we can then confront them, and we can address them,” said Turley. “Some of that reduces evidentiary challenges when we get to court and prosecutors start looking at prosecuting the case.”
In the video captured by Predator Poachers, Quinton is shown confessing to a corrections officer, “A week and a half ago I downloaded an app. I had gotten high on meth.”
Turley said Quinton had recently passed a drug test and that just days before the incident, corrections officers had searched his phone.
“If he’s out there actively engaging in sexual conversations online, I have no doubt we would have caught it,” said Turley.
Parole history
Quinton was convicted of his first sex offense in 2018. He went to a park with condoms in his coat pocket to meet a 13-year-old girl, but found law enforcement there instead.
After his first release on parole, he was convicted of a similar crime in Idaho in 2022.
The new conviction counted as a parole violation in the initial case, which prompted another stay in Utah’s prison system.
During a hearing in July last year, he tearfully asked Utah’s Board of Pardons and Parole for another chance.
“I do plan on doing better this time,” he said.
(Quinton) was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison.
–Spencer Turley, Utah Department of Corrections
According to a spokesperson for the parole board, Utah’s sentencing guidelines call for a 180-day sentence in response to a person’s first three parole violations. Quinton was most recently paroled in December, which meant the board kept him in custody longer than the standard amount of time after his additional conviction in Idaho.
“Your next hearing or release date is beyond the parole violation guideline because the board finds a public safety exception,” the board’s decision stated. “A public safety exception means the board finds that your conduct has or may present a substantial threat to public safety.”
Quinton spent three additional days in jail as a sanction in January, according to parole board documents.
“After he’d been out about two weeks, we did a phone check, and we found some adult pornography on his phone,” Turley explained.
While the content was not illegal, it did violate his release conditions. After spending a few days in jail, Quinton returned to the halfway house.
“One of the parameters of getting his phone back in that case was that he had to participate in sex offender treatment, and until his therapist felt like he was at a place to be responsible with the phone, we would not give it back to him,” said Turley.
He said the department gave Quinton back his phone about six weeks later, at the direction of his therapist.
What’s next?
“He’s not even the first sex offender we caught that day,” said Rosen.
Quinton is one of four men Rosen and his team confronted in Utah last month. Two of them were already convicted of sex crimes.
According to a police booking affidavit, David Burris was previously convicted of sexual abuse of a child. Rosen confronted him in Brigham City, where police arrested him.
“Utah’s prison system, judges and parole board need to go hard on these people,” said Rosen. “These sex offenders should not be available for us to catch.”
The KSL Investigators are still working to confirm law enforcement records related to the other two men.
Utah’s parole board has jurisdiction over Quinton through 2032 and will ultimately decide what happens to him next. Turley said the Department of Corrections will be recommending he serve additional prison time.
Turley said investigators are also performing forensic analysis on his phone to find out whether there were any real victims involved.
Have you experienced something you think just isn’t right? The KSL Investigators want to help. Submit your tip at investigates@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so we can get working for you.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is tracking cases of New World Screwworm after the first U.S. case since 1968 was detected in Texas.
The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food described New World Screwworm as a fly. The fly’s larvae burrow into the living tissue of warm-blooded animals, causing large wounds and even death in untreated animals.
Officials said the fly was eradicated from the United States in the late 60s. However, an increase in flies in Central America in recent years led to the discovery of New World Screwworm in Mexico and has since spread into the States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed on Wednesday that a three-week-old calf in Texas was carrying the fly’s larvae.
According to UDAF, if New World Screwworm spreads in the United States, it could cost billions in treatment costs, production, and losses.
“It is critical for animal owners and veterinarians to be aware of the signs of NWS and to report any suspicious cases immediately to the State Veterinarian’s office,” UDAF said in a statement.
Signs include discomfort, draining or enlarging wounds, and larvae or eggs in or around body openings, such as the nose and ears. The New World Screwworm most commonly affects livestock, pets, and wildlife and, in very rare cases, people and birds.
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SANTAQUIN — A mother is accused of leaving her young child in a hot car in 2019, resulting in the toddler’s death.
Amy Kay Bethers, 29, was charged Thursday in 4th District Court with child abuse homicide, a first-degree felony.
On Aug. 13, 2019, about 5:45 p.m., Bethers brought her 6-month-old son – identified in court documents only as W.T. – to Mountain View Hospital. An obituary identifies the toddler as Wade Ron Taylor.
The boy’s “jaw was locked tight in the onset of rigor mortis, he was warm to the touch, he had sloughing of the skin on his scalp, face, ear and chest, his skin was discolored and mottled, and (his) eyes were open with dryness over the cornea and fixated pupils,” according to charging documents. The toddler’s body temperature was recorded at 109.8 degrees Fahrenheit and he was pronounced deceased about 6:15 p.m.
Doctors “believed that W.T.’s death was probably related to being in a hot environment for too long,” the charges state.
Bethers told police she was driving with her child to a storage unit in Santaquin “when she noticed W.T. was not as ‘wiggly and chattery’ as usual, so she ‘rolled down the windows some more’ and turned around to go home,” according to the charges.
Bethers told police she noticed he was “getting discolored” and his lips turning purple, “and he started ‘getting stiff’ and drooling,” the charges state.
She told investigators that she had been driving for two to three hours and her vehicle did not have air conditioning. Temperatures that day reached about 93 degrees Fahrenheit.
W.T.’s “immediate cause of death was hyperthermia,” but the manner “‘could not be determined’ because her findings from the autopsy were not consistent with Bether’s accounting of events,” according to the charges.
A doctor later concluded “that under conditions where both windows were up and the vehicle was traveling 25 mph, W.T.’s temperature could reach 109.8 degrees in 50-70 minutes; under conditions where both windows were up and the vehicle was traveling 45 mph, W.T.’s temperature could reach 109.8 degrees in 70-150 minutes; under conditions where both windows were up and the vehicle was traveling 65 mph, there would be little to no change in W.T.’s temperature during anytime of the day. (The doctor) concluded that under conditions where the vehicle was parked in the sun and both windows were closed, W.T.’s temperature could reach 109.8 degrees in 40-50 minutes; under conditions where the vehicle was parked in the shade and both windows were closed, there would be no change in W.T.’s temperature,” the charges state.
Court documents do not explain why it took several years to follow up on the charges.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Department of Public Safety is urging people to make sure items are safely secured to vehicles while traveling on Utah roads. Saturday marks the 10th annual National Secure Your Load Day, and DPS is using the occasion to remind motorists that securing cargo isn’t just the law — it saves lives.
So far this year, there have been over 130 debris-related crashes in Utah, which are dangerous for other drivers and troopers who have to retrieve that debris.
“Statewide, on average about 70 times a day, highway patrol gets called to respond to debris in the roadways, so that adds up to over 25,000 times per year that we’re having to respond to get items pulled out of the roadway that people have not secured,” said UHP Lt. Zach Randall.
Unsecured loads are a persistent hazard on Utah’s roads, contributing to more than 700 preventable crashes and traffic disruptions each year. While incidents have dropped 12% over the past five years, DPS said the risk remains high and urges drivers to take “full responsibility for their cargo” before hitting the road.
Over the last five years, 17 fatalities have been caused by debris-related crashes.
Debris hazards can also cause serious injuries or deaths when striking vehicles, cyclists, or pedestrians, with DPS noting that such obstacles are often difficult to avoid safely, leading to sudden braking, swerving, and collisions.
Clearing debris can also slow traffic to a crawl. Interstate traffic is often halted entirely so crews can remove dangerous items from the roadway, adding delays and frustration for drivers.
Utah law carries fines between $200-1,000 for unsecured loads, and in severe cases, offenders can face penalties up to a Class A misdemeanor. Officials emphasize that a few minutes spent checking and securing cargo can prevent tragedy — and costly legal consequences.
Randall explained how it is important to use bungee cables, racket straps and rope to secure items to your car.
“We have a blanket that you could wrap over and then a bungee or tie-down strap over top of that,” he said. “So with some loose items like wood, we tied them together so they’re not bouncing around the truck, being able to bounce out. You can use something like a plastic wrap or a cellophane wrap to tie those together so that they’re in one unit.”
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