The man allegedly showed police a nude picture of a 12 or 13-year-old before being arrested.
MAGAZINE, Arkansas — The Logan County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO) said on Thursday that a member of an Indiana biker group has helped in the arrest of an alleged child predator.
A Facebook post from LCSO said that on Nov. 25, law enforcement was called to an address in Magazine.
The caller reportedly identified themself as a member of Bikers Against Predators, a group based in Indiana, according to LCSO.
The biker group member then told responding law enforcement that he was investigating 65-year-old Johnny Ray Hice, who was allegedly trying to meet up with a 12-year-old girl, LCSO said.
Officers made contact with Hice, who allegedly showed a text message with a picture of a nude female that he believed was 12 or 13 years old, the post explained.
“After seeing the photo on his phone, Officer Elkins placed him under arrest and transported him to the Logan County Detention Center and he was booked in on the anticipated charge of distributing, possessing, or viewing of matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child, a Class C felony,” the post said.
LCSO added that Hice’s phone had been seized, and that data would be extracted from it. The sheriff’s office said more charges are expected once the phone extraction is complete.
Hice is currently being held in the Logan County Detention Center on a $25,000 bond.
5NEWS reached out to Logan County Sheriff Jason Massey, who said they appreciate groups like these coming in to help with cases, but they want to make sure it’s a combined effort.
“A lot of these folks have good hearts, and they’re wanting to expose these people. And we recognize that, and so we want them to work with us,” Massey said. “One thing I wish that they would do is that they would meet with us before they go up to the house. I wish they would show us what they have and so we can get with the prosecutor to find out if we need to get search warrants and things like that.”
He added as law enforcement, they want all evidence possible in cases like these while making sure a suspect doesn’t have time to destroy it.
“Once you let suspects know what’s going on, getting rid of information becomes the next issue,” Massey said. “The more information you have that’s obtained through means that they can be shown in court, that the better prosecution we can have, the better case we can present to a jury, if it goes that far.”
“In the end, it’ll be a combined effort as we make sure that the files that we find on devices such as these are what our prosecutor can use in prosecuting people,” Massey added.
5NEWS also spoke to “Boots,” the president of Bikers Against Predators and the group member that helped make the arrest.
“Our outcome is just spreading awareness to the communities. I think that’s our number one goal. Obviously, convictions would be number two,” Boots said. “These individuals reach out to our decoy accounts on various social media sites, believing that they are communicating with an underage child arranging meetups or as sometimes, there’s more information that we do get about these individuals that lead us, even if the conversations aren’t actually graphic, that we believe that they could be involved in child sexual abuse material.”
Watch 5NEWS on YouTube.
Download the 5NEWS app on your smartphone:
Stream 5NEWS 24/7 on the 5+ app: How to watch the 5+ app on your streaming device
To report a typo or grammatical error, please email KFSMDigitalTeam@tegna.com and detail which story you’re referring to.