A mother has busted a suspected sex offender by pretending a photo of a Target bra model was her 11-year-old daughter - before allegedly receiving naked photos of him in return. The woman from St Petersburg, Florida, who did not want to be identified, pulled off the plan after discovering her daughter had gone against her wishes and set up a Facebook account.
One night she noticed that
the young girl was messaging a much-older man, 23-year-old Michael Jerome
Bradley, after he added her as a friend on the social networking site in May. Shocked by the allegedly
horrifying messages he was sending the young girl - including that he wanted to
have sex with her and for her to have his baby - she called him.
'Do you know she's 11
years old?' she asked him, she told the Tampa Tribune.
'If you keep calling my daughter, if you keep texting my daughter, I'm going to
call the police and have you arrested.' She contacted the police,
but they said they did not have enough to go on, she said. So she took the law
into her own hands. When Bradley allegedly
asked the young girl to send him photographs of herself, the mother said she
found a bra advert in a Target magazine and sent him a picture of that instead.
'I scrolled through the
Target paper,' she told 10 News.
'I saw a girl in her bra, so I just grabbed my cell phone, took a picture of it
and sent it to him.'
After receiving it, he
allegedly sent her graphic text messages and naked photographs of himself -
which was enough evidence for the police to make an arrest.
The mother said she was
'terrified' on receiving the messages.
'I just thank God that I
got a hold of it when I did,' she said. 'I can only image how far things could
have gone if I would not have got a hold of it.'
Bradley was arrested on
Friday and is being held at the Pinellas County Jail on $120,000 bail.
He was charged with eight
counts of displaying obscene images to a minor and unlawful use of a two-way
communication device. 'Obviously we commend [the
mother] for her diligence in monitoring her daughter's online activity, which
is what was preach,' said St. Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz. 'We would caution one
needs to proceed carefully when attempting to go to the next level and continue
communications with the effort to try and develop a case.
'Usually this is something
best left to law enforcement.'
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