EUGENE, Ore. – According to the FBI, at any given point there are an estimated 500,000 internet predators actively pursuing children on the World Wide Web – as many as 5 million in total. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports a 12% increase in reports to their agency in 2023, totaling 36.2 million reports to their cyber tip line in 2023 alone. Eugene Police Department Violent Crimes Unit Detective Jay says that even with those statistics, every predator he nabs is at least one child saved.
“We’re able to see the communications and how someone has enticed and tried to lure a minor into a sexual encounter with them, and this is our attempt to making some sort of a proactive approach to that so we can hopefully lessen the number of actual victims we have in cases,” Jay said.
Detective Jay requested anonymity due to the undercover nature of his work. He said he helped arrest four alleged predators earlier in December. On December 26, Jay helped nab one more when Dustin Hines, 37, of Salem, was arrested at a popular family restaurant on Coburg Road, having borrowed his mother’s car to make the drive to meet who he thought was a teenage girl.
“The decoy, the person he’s supposed to meet, is not a real person, it’s actually me pretending to be a person who is under aged,” Jay said. “What I’ve done is I’ve created some personas, and I have had interactions with teenagers from other cases I’ve investigated, and I’ve kind of learned how they talk. There’s a lot of emojis, there’s a lot of short hand that I’ve had to learn. And every now and then I’ll get some that I have to google to see what it means.”
Hines, a sex offender who has been previously charged with rape and kidnapping but took a plea deal to sexual abuse charges back in 2016, was just one of many people pursuing the teenage girl’s social media profile created by detective Jay. No post or advertisement was made for the profile, which had an AI-generated profile picture, but it quickly started getting dozens of friend requests, including one from Hines. Detective Jay said Hines had contacted the social media profile on December 23, and within an hour had sent inappropriate photos and videos of himself – already a crime.
While Detective Jay waited in the parking lot for Hines to show up, his phone chimed with new messages every few minutes. He said that if he had more time and resources, he’d have plenty of people to investigate. Detective Jay said he’s had men show up with drugs and guns, and one man even brought a makeshift kidnapping kit including rope, a mask and duct tape.
According to cyber tip line statistics, there were nearly 187,000 reports of online enticement of children for sexual acts in 2024, up from just over 44,000 in 2021. Reports of unsolicited obscene material sent to a child were up to nearly 48,000 from just over 5,000 in 2021.
Detective Jay said his hope is that the Eugene Police Department will be able to dedicate a team to investigating online predators full time, taking more of them off the street. Detective Jay said he’d gladly lead that team. For parents concerned about their kids’ online activity, detective Jay had some recommendations.
“You need to be involved with your kids’ social media use. These cases can develop very fast. We’ve arrested people within a few hours of initial contact,” detective Jay said. “Children are often naïve to some people’s intentions. While they may seem interested in the child, they are often times not interested in the child, just interested in having a sexual encounter with a child.”
Detective Jay said four people were arrested in one week in the most recent operation.
Meanwhile in similar but unrelated sting operations, a Eugene man, Bleu Blaze Donahue, 23, was arrested in Douglas County on December 29. Investigators said Donahue had driven from Eugene to Myrtle Creek to meet up with a teen girl there who was actually a Douglas County detective doing similar work to Detective Jay.