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In a glaring example of the dangers lurking in online social media sites, where adult male sex predators troll personal profiles in search of young victims, Santa Maria Police Department detectives have successfully taken one such perpetrator offline.
According to SMPD spokesman Lt. Daniel Rios, the department’s Community Services Unit led the investigation into the activities of 35-year-old Santa Maria resident Salvador Montar Morales pursuant to reports that he had used “social media messaging” to contact and 11-year-old juvenile female and her mother. The nature of those contacts involved Morales’s “intent to engage in sexual acts with the child.”
With the cooperation of the intended mother-and-child victims, a meeting was set for the morning of March 20th between themselves and Morales in a shopping center parking lot. When Morales appeared on the scene at approximately 9:00 a.m. that morning, he was met with a phalanx of SMPD detectives and uniformed patrol officers who promptly took him into custody.
Morales was then transported to Santa Barbara County Jail, where he was booked “on suspicion of arranging and meeting with a minor with the intent to engage in sexual acts,” in addition to using the internet to “send and solicit” harmful and obscene sexual material to a minor.
