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.

Special delivery

“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.