by Ben Miller
Before dissecting these flaws, it is important to note that it is entirely possible that a predator like Melvin Young could have attacked another child regardless of any state or federal regulations. It is also noteworthy that every individual involved in this case who had been entrusted to carry out the current state and federal laws acted in accord with their duties to the best of their abilities. This chapter is not meant to indict any one person, but rather the current legal infrastructure that is in place.
Melvin Andrew Young was born February 18, 1978, in Dixonville, Tennessee, a small town about 25 miles north of Memphis. His mother, Geraldine “Gerri” Wesley, was twenty years old at the time of his birth. She had been dating his father, Patrick Young, a twenty-nine-year-old mechanic, for about six months when she got pregnant. They moved in together and tried to raise Melvin as an unmarried couple, but, after only four months, they realized that they could not co-exist under the same roof. Gerri moved out to her parents’ house and took Melvin with her. Patrick remained involved peripherally, seeing his son on the occasional holiday. Public records cite no infractions against Patrick Young for failing to pay child support.
By all accounts, including Melvin’s, Gerri Wesley had been a loving mother. Her parents pitched in to help take care of Melvin so that she could go back to work as a secretary at a local real estate company. In that office in the summer of 1981, she met Porter Upton, a forty-two-year-old retired army officer, once divorced, who moved to Dixonville to start a riverboat fishing expedition business. (Dixonville is only a few miles from the Mississippi River, and the region draws thousands of vacationing fishermen annually in search of legendary big blue catfish.) Upton courted her for over a year before she agreed to date him, telling him that her duties as a single mother took priority over dating.
They dated for three years before marrying in February, 1985. They had two children together, both girls—Harriet born in January, 1986, and Faith in August, 1987. There were never any official or unofficial reports of inappropriate activity between Melvin and his two younger half-sisters. In fact, Melvin led a seemingly normal childhood. Despite the lack of a meaningful connection with his biological father, Melvin did not want for a father figure. Porter Upton served this role well. Once Melvin was old enough, he worked part-time in Upton’s business, eventually working his way up to fishing guide during the summer after he finished high school.
In school Melvin neither was an outcast nor a member of the in-crowd. He got along well with almost everyone, but had no real close friends. He dated a few girls from his class minimally. He earned decent grades. He participated on the track and field team as a hurdler. In August 1996, he matriculated to Middle Tennessee State in Mufreesboro, Tennessee, about four and a half hours from home. His half-sisters were ten and nine years old at the time.
Melvin seemed to have difficulty adjusting to life away from home. He did not make friends. He wrote frequent letters home to his mother, and occasionally wrote to his younger sisters Harriet and Faith. He called home weekly during the first semester. Though he requested to come home many weekends, his mother refused to come to Murfreesboro to get him. Her letters (which Melvin kept) declined lovingly, saying that she knew it would be “best for him to enjoy a college life,” a life she herself never got to experience. This must have created a schism in the relationship, because he stopped writing letters to his mother (though continued writing to his sisters), and the phone calls were much less frequent.
Despite his social shortcomings, Melvin continued to perform adequately in his academic work. The summer between his freshman and sophomore year he got a job as a research assistant in a pharmacology lab. After graduation in 2000 with a Bachelor’s of Science in chemistry, Melvin took a full-time job in the lab of Ghorge Mihalac, a doctor of pharmacology with the University. Melvin’s duties included working on preservatives for various chemicals and drug components. According to interviews with members of the research staff, Melvin never contributed any original work in the lab, but he performed his assigned tasks without difficulty. He was initially considered a valued member of the research team.
Dr. Mihalac was known throughout his department, and even in far corners of the University, as an admired leader and generous man. He frequently held social gatherings for his staff, from hosting an open tab at a local bar during happy hour to pool parties at his family’s home. It was at a pool party in 2004 that Melvin met Mihalac’s then eight-year-old daughter Natasha. Colleagues remember Melvin and Natasha having a brief conversation in the shallow end of the pool during that party, but nothing else. However, at each successive gathering over the next year, party-goers recall only in retrospect that Melvin seemed to seek out more and more interactions with Natasha. Dr. and Mrs. Mihalac do not have the same recollection, citing their focus on hosting parties as the reason they did not notice Melvin spending time with their daughter.
The Mihalacs held another pool party over Labor Day weekend 2005. It was there that Melvin sexually assaulted Natasha. He followed her upstairs to her bedroom when she invited him up to see her newly acquired goldfish. After a failed attempt to force her to perform oral sex on him, he convinced her to take off her bathing suit while he masturbated. After he finished he told Natasha never to mention this incident to anyone. They returned to the pool party separately, as per his instructions. Shortly afterward Melvin excused himself and went home.
Natasha did not mention anything to her parents or anyone else for three months, though her parents noticed a distinct difference in her demeanor over that time. Her grades in school dropped from straight As to Bs and Cs. She did not want to spend time with any of her friends. When her goldfish died in late September due to starvation, she did not ask her parents to replace them.
Her unusually withdrawn behavior rapidly escalated the day before the Mihalacs were due to host a holiday party for Dr. Mihalac’s office staff in December. She finally confessed to her parents about the incident at the pool party over Labor Day. Livid, Ghorge Mihalac called Melvin directly and berated him over the phone. His wife had to restrain him from getting in his car to go after him. She called the local police to report the incident.
An officer came to the Mihalac home and interviewed the family. As a father of a young girl himself, the officer was outraged toward Melvin Young and extremely empathetic to Natasha. While being very sensitive to her understandable fear of a strange man, he asked her several questions to clarify the information that her parents had provided. He then called his station to be connected to detectives involved in sexual crimes. One detective was dispatched to the Mihalac home, while another detective, accompanied by two uniformed officers, went to Melvin’s apartment and brought him to the police station for questioning.
When the detective from the sexual crimes division arrived at the Mihalac home, the first thing he did was to ask the responding officer if he had asked Natasha any specific questions about the alleged assault. He affirmed that he had. Unfortunately, the officer did not know that this was a breach of protocol. Children under such stressful circumstances can be highly suggestible, a fact known to every good criminal defense lawyer. In order for a child’s testimony regarding sexual crimes to stand up in court, the child needs to be questioned in what is known as a forensic interview. Such an interview process follows a prescribed set of questions designed to not lead children in any direction when retelling their experiences as possible victims of sexual crimes. These interviews are conducting by trained professionals in an observed, designated setting. The fact that the responding officer asked pointed questioned directly to Natasha could provide ample ammunition to a defense lawyer if the case were to go to trial.
The protocol for interviewing children who are potential victims of sexual crimes was taught to all students enrolled in police academies in the State of Tennessee beginning in 1998. However, this particular officer had graduated years earlier, before this information had been added into the curriculum. He should have participated in an i
n-service program as part of ongoing education, but there was no record of that having taken place. One could argue that this officer himself should be held accountable for his ignorance of best practice. A reasonable counterargument is that he simply acted as most caring human beings would in such a situation, having either missed or forgotten some of his necessary training. In either case, had the interview of Natasha Mihalac been conducted appropriately, perhaps she could have been a viable witness to take the case of her sexual assault to trial.
As it turned out, the case never did go to trial. Melvin Young denied all of the accusations from the Mihalacs. No evidence of the crime existed, despite the efforts of the forensics team that scoured Natasha’s bedroom looking for traces of semen. A search of Melvin’s apartment revealed dozens of photographs of young girls on his computer, most of them naked. His files also included several photos he had taken with his own camera of Natasha Mihalac, fully clothed. Melvin’s possession of these types of photos surely seemed incriminating. However, without a reliable witness, the charge of sexual assault still amounted to a circumstantial case. As a result, the District Attorney of Rutherford County, Tennessee, an honorable man named Ward Valker, offered a plea deal to Melvin Young. According to the deal, the County would drop the felony charges of Use of a Child in a Sexual Performance and Promoting a Sexual Performance by a Child, and Melvin would plead guilty to Sexual Misconduct and Possession of Child Pornography, both misdemeanors. He would serve a twelve-month sentence, but likely receive parole in nine to ten months. Young’s attorney, knowing well the conservative juries in Tennessee, advised his client to take the deal. Melvin Young accepted the plea deal and, on November 29, 2006, he was incarcerated at South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tennessee.
Melvin served just under ten months of his twelve-month sentence. He was released on September 26, 2007 into parole. He would need to remain in Tennessee to complete his parole term, which was a total of three years from conviction. He completed his parole term while residing in Clifton, where he had found a job working as a truck driver for a dry cleaning business. His family back home had cut off all communication, presumably out of embarrassment, which further isolated Melvin.
During this time he opened an account with a popular online social network, through which he reconnected with an acquaintance from high school, Gregory Trumbull, who lived in North Kensington, Maryland. They became close friends via their internet connection, closer than they had been in high school. Once Melvin’s parole term was complete, he moved to North Kensington in December, 2009, presumably to be closer to his good—and only—friend in his time of need. Trumbull had recently been diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which offered a poor prognosis.
As a convicted sexual offender, under the Wetterling Act of 1994 and the so-called Megan’s Law of 1996, Melvin Young would need to register himself with his local community as such, regardless of location. Prior to 2006, each state had to maintain its own registry and its own method of organizing and maintaining it. Very little consistency or communication existed between states regarding the practices of their sexual offender registries. In an attempt to rectify this situation, in 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, named after the boy who was abducted and killed in Hollywood, Florida, in 1981, and whose father, John Walsh, went on to become host of TV’s America’s Most Wanted and a strong advocate for victims’ rights. One provision of this act is the Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act, commonly referred to as SORNA.
The main purpose of SORNA was to standardize sexual offender registration and community notification practices in individual states. SORNA famously uses a three-tiered system to stratify offenders on their risk of recidivism (repeat offenses). The basis for placing a sexual offender in a particular tier comes solely from his or her crime of conviction. Presumably, an offender from Tier 1, which is composed of seemingly less heinous crimes, is less at risk for recidivism than an offender from Tier 3, the harshest and most violent crimes. Therefore, under SORNA, Melvin fell into the Tier 1 classification, as he had only been convicted of a misdemeanor. This meant that he would need to register with the national database registry annually for 15 years, and with any change of address. His registration would include his address, photograph, phone number, e-mail address, and place of employment. In contrast, someone convicted of a Tier 2 felony needs to register every six months for 25 years, and someone convicted of a felony that falls into the Tier 3 classification must register quarterly for the duration of his or her life. Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 offenses also carry longer parole terms with higher levels of monitoring.
Unfortunately, recent research has shown that this three-tiered system does not work. In fact, a study conducted by the State of New York Department of Corrections published in 2009 showed that Tier 1 offenders were actually more likely to be arrested for repeat offenses—both sexual and non-sexual—than Tier 2 or Tier 3 offenders. In addition, on average Tier 1 offenders were also arrested sooner after their release than offenders from the other two tiers. Therefore, monitoring these criminals less vigorously and less often does not seem to make any sense.
Instead, profiling tools have been developed that seem to hold up to scrutiny much better that SORNA’s three-tiered system. Two such systems developed in the late 1990’s – Static-99 and the Minnesota Sex Offender Risk Screening Tool, Revised, or MnSOST-R—had been implemented in several states prior to the signing of The Adam Walsh Act. However, once SONRA came into effect, these states had to abandon those systems due to cost issues; no state could afford to carry out two separate screening and risk stratification tools.
An economic paradox exists in this situation as well, sadly typical in our current political climate. It is estimated that each state would need to spend around $30,000,000 annually to implement and maintain the SORNA Tier system. Failing to do so would result in the forfeiture of 10% of that states’ annual financial support from a specific federal fund known as the Byrne fund (no association with this author). In 2009, this amount totaled $1,127,984. In theory, then, a state could save itself nearly $29,000,000 annually by deliberately disobeying the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.
Had Rutherford County DA Valker pursued and obtained a conviction for Melvin Young of a felony in 2006, Young would have fallen into Tier 2 status, which would have required closer and more frequent monitoring. In addition, not surprisingly, had he been evaluated by one of the more effective screening tools, Melvin Young would have scored sufficiently high on either the Static-99 or MnSOST-R to warrant closer scrutiny as a high risk for re-offense. This illustrates yet further ways in which the current system failed to help protect people like Lamaya Hollows.
Finally, Melvin Young found a way to exploit one more hole in our current system of trying to protect children from sexual predators. Six months after Melvin moved to North Kensington, Gregory Trumbull stopped working at his current job due to his illness. Trumbull had been a middle school chemistry teacher at North Catholic School in nearby Silver Springs. Having completed the academic year in June, 2010, Trumbull had asked for a year’s sabbatical to deal with his illness, which the school granted. He never returned to teach at North Catholic, however.
Miraculously, over the next year, Gregory Trumbull recovered from his ostensibly terminal illness. He applied for a new teaching job in the Middle School at Washington Country Day School. School officials from Washington Country Day contacted administrators from North Catholic, who vouched for Trumbull as a conscientious and attentive teacher. He had all of his necessary paperwork, including his Federal Act 33 Clearance papers and state documents citing no history of offenses against children. He had previously undergone FBI fingerprint clearance for his previous teaching job. Washington Country Day School hired him without reservation, and in September, 2011, Gregory Trumbull began teaching third grade.
In May 2012, the man named Gregory Trumbull, like every other tea
cher at Washington Country Day, participated in interviews by police and federal investigators regarding the disappearance of Lamaya Hollows. He claimed no knowledge of her case. In May, Melvin Young’s DNA was found in gum recovered from the stomach of Lamaya Hollows. Photographs of Melvin Young revealed that he had assumed the identity of Gregory Trumbull sometime between June, 2010, and September, 2011, presumably to be hired as a school teacher and have easy access to young girls.
Melvin Young has revealed nothing about those 15 months between Trumbull’s last days at North Catholic School and Young’s first appearance in Trumbull’s guise at Washington Country Day. Trumbull’s cancer-riddled body was found in a large meat freezer in the garage of his own home. An autopsy could not accurately determine how long Trumbull had been dead, due to the significant delay in decomposition while in the freezer. The cause of death was determined to be his lymphoma, so, while eventually convicted of numerous crimes, Young was never charged with Trumbull’s murder.
Young had seemingly taken up residence at Trumbull’s home. His official residence that he registered with the Sexual Offender Database was the apartment he had originally occupied upon his arrival in North Kensington. This had never been verified by any government agency. He also listed his occupation as a freelance telemarketer working from home, which a telemarketing corporation later confirmed, but only from March through November 2010.
After the discovery that Young had been masquerading as Trumbull to obtain employment in an elementary school, initial blame fell hard upon administrators at Washington Country Day School. However, it is important to point out that they followed all due diligence and regulations as stipulated by state and federal governments. Any individual working with children (e.g. school employees, day care workers, hospital volunteers) must first receive clearance to do so by both state and federal governments. This usually consists of three phases: a criminal record check and child abuse clearance, which are conducted by the state, and a fingerprinting check conducted by the FBI. Interestingly, in most states, including Maryland, none of these steps require direct contact with a full-time government official. The child abuse clearance requires that the applicant sign the document in the presence of a notary public. While notary publics ostensibly serve as extensions of government, in reality many of them— including the one who signed off on Melvin Young’s false paperwork—receive their notary designation through a five- to ten-minute online process. In addition, results from the FBI fingerprinting clearance are sent directly to the individual, not his or her place of employment. The document also has no photographic or other form of identification on it. Melvin Young simply found Gregory Trumbull’s copy of his FBI clearance and dropped it off at Washington Country Day. In fact, in a matter of a few weeks, this child molester received his clearance to work as a school teacher and had earned a job at Washington Country Day School.