Fort Gay police target child predators

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FORT GAY, W.Va. (WCHS) — The Fort Gay Police Department has been working around the clock to keep Operation Mountain Justice going, to target and arrest child predators.

“If you’re going to prey on children, that is something that Fort Gay is not going to tolerate,” Fort Gay Police Chief Evan Wilson said. “This is a fight that we’re willing to take a stand on and I think the public is going to see a lot more operations like this.”

Wilson is one of two full time officers at the department and he said they partnered with the nonprofit Veterans for Child Rescue on this child exploitation investigation.

“We’ve had three arrests so far,” he said. “Two vehicle pursuits, one ended in a vehicle crashing into a house. One of the targets that we arrested based off of the tattoos the gentleman had and talking to our intelligence unit, we believe this person is a member of a cartel group out of Mexico. He’s in the United States illegally and he came to Fort Gay early this morning to do what he thought was sexual acts with a 14-year-old.”

Wilson said they will continue this work, but he encourages parents to know what their children are doing on social media.

“It’s scary,” he said. “As a father myself, I just encourage parents to look through their phones check their social media because, how quickly the target engagement specialist talked to these predators, in a few hours, a predator can come to your house take your child and cause irreversible damage to them, and then more scary, they can take them away.”