A 56-year-old Mount Vernon man appeared Monday in Clark County Superior Court on suspicion of communicating and trying to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Much of his communication was with an undercover officer, however.
Officers with the Vancouver Police Department Digital Evidence Cybercrime Unit arrested Michael G. Carruth on Sunday as he stood outside the Motel 6 on Northeast Chkalov Drive, according to a probable cause affidavit. Carruth was waiting outside to meet with someone he believed was a girl he had been text messaging for a month, the affidavit states.
Carruth faces allegations of felony communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and second-degree attempted rape of a child.
A police sergeant with the cybercrimes unit wrote in a probable cause affidavit that a girl received a text from Carruth on March 28. A man calling himself Mike said he was 48 years old and sent the girl a photo of a white man with gray hair. The girl told her parents about the texts, and they promptly called police, court records say.
The sergeant then texted Carruth, posing as the girl, and the conversation quickly turned sexual, according to the affidavit. Over the course of four weeks, Carruth “sent numerous texts with sexually explicit communication to me, as well as over 20 (nude and sexually explicit) photos of himself,” the sergeant wrote in the affidavit.
Carruth was informed multiple times of the girl’s age, but it did not stop him from messaging or asking the girl to send pictures dressed in underwear, according to the affidavit.
At one point, Carruth asked the girl to mail him underwear and provided an address in Mount Vernon. The sergeant sent Carruth some underwear, court records say.
Carruth expressed a desire to travel from his hometown to Vancouver to meet and have sex with the girl, and he eventually arranged to meet at a motel room, according to the affidavit.
When plainclothes officers approached Carruth and arrested him, he “stated, ‘Please, I don’t want the girl seeing me like this.’ I (the sergeant) advised him that there was no girl, that he had been communicating with undercover officers,” the affidavit says.
During his first appearance Monday, Judge Daniel Stahnke set Carruth’s bail at $25,000. He will be arraigned May 17, court records show.
