Wonder how JWs, both rank and file and the higher ups, feel about these pics in the media?
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/state/8918466.htm?1c
Cary Verse pays price of freedom
By Guy Ashley
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
SAN JOSE - Something about the Mission Motel suggests that few customers prefer to stay long.
Maybe it's the scent left by years of Lysol and cigarette smoke. Or the sign that advertises rooms for rent by the week, by the day or by the hour.
It's the same thing that leaves you surprised to see Cary Verse settling into this sun-battered plot of warped wood, peeling paint and pavement, sensing normalcy returning to his life for the first time in more than a decade.
"It isn't the Hyatt," Verse says from the doorway of his room, a cramped space bursting with personal possessions that include a mountain bike authorities won't let him ride. "But after 12 years of prison cells and dormitories, it's pretty nice."'
Verse, 33, is the four-time convicted sex offender whose release from the state corrections system Feb. 5 sent a shudder of fear through the Bay Area.
His first taste of freedom since 1992 was greeted by angry picketers, stark denunciations by public officials and a less-than-uplifting series of temporary quarters in dimly lit hotels and boarding houses.
Before he even left lockup at Atascadero State Hospital, where he was confined for nearly six years under the state's "sexually violent predator"' law, an estimated 130 landlords across the Bay Area had rejected him.
Three times in his first five weeks of freedom, Verse was flushed from a home by public pressure, each time resuming life in new surroundings and watching a new wave of community revulsion build.
So it began in San Jose on March 15, as protesters with picket signs flooded the sidewalk fronting the Mission Motel within hours of Verse's arrival. They claimed Verse's presence placed their children in peril and questioned the decision to dump him in the South Bay.
"He has no family here, few community ties," says Forrest Williams, a San Jose city councilman who continues to demand that Verse be moved from his current home. "And even if he did, the Mission Motel is not the place for him to be getting his life back on track."
Verse, who is hopeful he will find more permanent housing in the coming months, says the protests marked the greatest test in his four months out of lockup. He seems to have endured the hardships well.
"If I was them, I would be scared, too," Verse says of demonstrators who greeted him in three counties. "They don't know me. The only thing they know are those three words: sexually violent predator. Those words tell me that this guy is dangerous, he's going to hurt my kids and we need to get him out of the neighborhood."
After about two weeks of protests that made life at the motel a bit chaotic, public attention waned.
And Verse was left to encounter a new reality -- quiet.
"I do get lonely," Verse says. "But for the first time since I got out, I don't feel closed in. I'm taking buses, riding in cars, going to people's houses for dinner. I have friends. I can focus on making a good life for myself, which feels good after all these years."
Most of those friends are people Verse has met since his release. The majority attend the church where Verse worships twice a week as a devout Jehovah's Witness.
There's also the freelance video producer who is doing a documentary about Verse's life and the retired public health nurse who marched through the phalanx of protesters outside the Mission, knocked on his door and told him to call. She now meets Verse once a week for a game of Scrabble.
Freedom for Verse involves lots of regimentation. He must keep a log documenting every trip outside, every telephone call, every visitor, every package sent and received, every expense.
But he feels the stranglehold of public attention loosening. His face, or the intimidating version of it conveyed in a prison mug shot, is no longer a staple of the evening news.
People do still recognize him, though, a fact made vividly clear during an interview last week at a South San Jose fast-food restaurant, where some patrons eyed him suspiciously as he ordered a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.
"People either recognize my face or the bag," he says, pointing to a black Velcro satchel he must carry at all times. It contains a radio-like global positioning device authorities use to monitor his every move.
Verse isn't shying from the attention. He flashes a bright smile to most anyone who meets his gaze. To those who choose to engage him in conversation he usually offers something more -- a colorful leaflet with a headline such as, "Would you Like to Know More About the Bible?"
It is literature that men of his faith might offer door-to-door on a Saturday morning, neighborhood rounds Verse says he can have no part in. "People who know who I am would be scared to death,'' he said.
He's also speaking out -- articulating his determination to prove that reform is possible, even for a habitual sex offender who has spent nearly all his adult life behind bars.
"I can't change what I have done,'' he says. "The only thing I can do for my victims at this point is be a good person and never commit another crime again."
Verse says he still feels bitterness about his incarceration, what he calls the "trickery" of a state law that allowed him to be held in a locked a treatment program for years after he served his prison sentence.
But he believes strongly that treatment helped him to control his violent impulses. He says the Atascadero program paid other dividends, among them entrance into a conditional release program that provides $160 in weekly living expenses and pays his $210 weekly rent.
While the Verse of old "didn't care what happened to the people I was abusing,'' he says he now feels deep empathy for his victims because their plight reminds him that he, too, was sexually assaulted -- at age 5 by a friend's father and again at 14 by a group of older boys.
He feels free to talk about what he believes were the roots of his life as a sex offender -- a dangerous mix of confusion caused by religion, rejection by loved ones and an inability to express deep sexual feelings he felt as early as age 8 toward other males.
At 14, Verse confided in a teammate on his high school track team about his attraction to other boys. Within days, the teammate revealed the secret to other classmates, who heckled him with names such as "fagboy" and "queer."
A few days later, four teammates cornered Verse in a school bathroom after practice, beat him and took turns sexually assaulting him.
"It turned me from being confused to angry,'' Verse said. "I told myself I would never be a victim again."
In the years that followed, Verse says he tried to stifle his attraction to other boys by dating girls and running obsessively, a practice that made him a standout in the 880-yard run but did little to keep his feelings at bay.
When he was a high school junior, Verse invited a friend from the track team over to his house to play video games. He ended up sexually assaulting the boy while threatening him with a kitchen knife.
The boy fled and Verse waited. The police arrived the next day.
Verse's stepfather, the man who raised him after his biological father left the family when Verse was 1, was visibly disgusted. "Take him away," he told the police. Verse hasn't spoken to his stepfather since.
A court ordered Verse confined to a juvenile detention camp. Verse was caught for two more sexual assaults over the following three years, once while in detention, once when he molested the teenage son of family friends in Albany. He served 11/2 years behind bars for assaulting the boy, and was out no more than a month when he attacked a man near a Richmond homeless shelter in 1992.
He used a pair of scissors in the attack and, as a repeat adult offender, was subject to a much harsher sentence than ever before. He got 12 years, half of which he spent in prison, most of the other half at Atascadero.
Before his scheduled release from prison, psychologists diagnosed Verse with a mental disorder characterized as a paraphilia. Verse's condition involves urges for abnormal sex, which in his case focused on forcing sex on others.
Verse believes strongly that the condition sprang from his own victimization as a child, his guilt over straying from his religious beliefs and the disastrous results of confiding in a friend as a teenager.
"I wanted a relationship," he said. "But the only way I thought I could have one was through force, by becoming the aggressor."
Verse says he now is able to live with these feelings as never before and to pursue his religious beliefs free of conflicts he once felt.
This new sense of calm, he admits, is aided by a titanium rod implanted in his right arm that releases a drug called Lupron into his system.
Lupron blocks testosterone and thus quells his sexual urges. The procedure is commonly referred to as "chemical castration." Verse says he has opted against physical castration to leave open the possibility that he may engage in an intimate relationship with a woman someday. He admits, though, that he may need the implants "for the rest of my life" if runaway impulses return.
Today, Verse calls himself a bisexual, and he vows to stay true to his religious beliefs by never again acting on his attraction to males.
Authorities admit they are concerned that the clash between religion and desire that formed the foundation of Verse's criminal behavior still exists.
"It was the key issue of his therapy -- how does his sexual orientation conflict with his strict beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness," said Brian Haynes, a Contra Costa County prosecutor assigned to monitor the condition of Verse's release.
Six psychologists who examined Verse, as well as Contra Costa Superior Court Judge John Minney, believe he has developed the tools to manage the conflict and a compulsion for forced sex that has been diagnosed as "essentially a lifelong condition," Haynes said.
"At this point, everyone believes his release should come with a strict set of conditions," Haynes said. "Nobody is saying, 'turn him loose.'"
Verse says he believes the experts. More, though, he says he believes in the desire to reform that flows from his own heart.
"I want people to understand how far I'm willing to go to stay out of trouble, whether it's electronic monitoring, chemical castration or whatever," he says. "I don't want anyone else to have nightmares about Cary Verse."
