21-year-old Man Arrested for Sexually Assaulting 12-year-old Girl He Met on Tinder
Photo: Sean Rickard
ANAHEIM – A 21-year-old man from Anaheim, was arrested last Wednesday night under suspicion of sexually assaulting an underage girl he met on Tinder.
On February 25, 2019, the Santa Ana Police Department received a report from an unidentified charter school that one of its students, a 12-year-old girl, had been sexually assaulted by an adult male, identified as suspect Sean Rickard.
Rickard and the girl had first met on Tinder, then continued communicating via Snapchat. She had initially claimed that she was 19 years old but disclosed her true age to Rickard after they had been corresponding for eight months.
On the day the incident was reported, the girl had been picked up from school by Rickard, then taken to a parking lot in Santa Ana, where he sexually assaulted her.
Upon learning that Rickard and the girl had been using Snapchat to communicate, Detectives began using the account and posing as the girl in order to capture him.
Rickard apparently fell for the ruse. Under the assumption he was still communicating with the girl, he sent an explicit video to her, then agreed to meet her later that evening “for the purposes of engaging in sex acts,” the release read. Detectives arrested Rickard in a parking lot behind a clothing store in Anaheim and put him behind bars at the Orange County Jail.
Rickard was charged with multiple counts of child abuse and had his bail set at $100,000.00.
