LEHI – When the afternoon bell rings at Traverse Mountain Elementary School, children pour into the nearby streets, hopping into waiting cars, walking into the nearby Lehi neighborhood, and zipping toward home on bikes and scooters.

“As soon as 2:20 hits, the streets are flooded with kids,” Lyla Arroyo said as she waited in her car to pick up her daughter on a recent fall day.

A sense of safety and community is why many families choose to live there, and several parents told the KSL Investigators they do their research – checking Utah’s online sex offender and kidnapping registry.

“It’s always good to know as a parent,” Adam Ochoa said. He also lives nearby. “It is a tool we do rely on.”

The online registry’s homepage promises “the most accurate and timely information available,” but a KSL Investigation more than a year in the making uncovered more than 100 convicted sex offenders who should have been on the registry and were not.

“Wow, that’s not something any parent wants to hear,” Arroyo said. “It kind of makes me sick to my stomach.”

While people with criminal convictions that require them to be on the registry do sometimes attempt to skirt the law, the KSL Investigators found many were in compliance and did register, but the state failed to publish their profiles for the public to see.

“There has been delay,” Dan Blanchard, Director of the Utah Department of Corrections Adult Probation and Parole Division said.

As a result of the KSL Investigators’ findings, Utah’s Department of Corrections, which maintains the registry, said it is conducting an internal audit and hiring additional temporary staff members to address an administrative backlog.

‘That’s really scary’

The registry is not just a tool for parents. Tamara Higbee told the KSL Investigators she’s used the registry to map out her jogging routes and before she got married, to background potential dates.

“I do it to kind of protect myself,” she said.

Higbee said learning from the KSL Investigators that the registry has been incomplete for more than a year sparked feelings of anger and frustration.

“And it’s kind of a little bit of fear because now, I don’t know,” she said. “That’s really scary.”

The KSL Investigators identified more than 200 convicted sex offenders we believed to be missing from Utah’s registry. Since requesting an interview with the Department of Corrections in September, more than 112 of the offenders on our list have been added to the registry, confirming they should have already been there.

While some of them are currently incarcerated, more than half of those added to the registry are living in Utah communities. At least 54 are currently on probation or parole under the supervision of Adult Probation and Parole.

Administrative Delays

Utah law directs the Department of Corrections to register offenders upon placement on probation, commitment to a correctional facility, release on parole or termination of sentence, entrance to community-based residential programs, and termination of probation or parole.

“It is very important to have [the registry] be accurate and up to date,” Blanchard said during an interview with the KSL Investigators earlier in the month.

Blanchard said as offenders register, their information is available to law enforcement through the registry. The delay has been with the public side of the registry, the one Utah families rely on.

“There has been delays seen on having the switch to turn them on the public profile,” Blanchard said.

He said the department often waits to collect all documentation and verify all information before publishing an offender’s profile for the public to see.

But the profiles of more than 100 people the KSL Investigators have been tracking who have recently been added to the registry are not newly convicted. The KSL Investigators identified offenders missing from the registry who were sentenced anywhere from a year to even decades ago.

In many cases, it’s unclear how long an offender’s information has been missing from the public registry, or whether it was ever there at all.

In one case, a man convicted of sexual abuse of a child in 2006 did not appear during a search of the public registry in August of this year. Blanchard said he did appear on the registry previously, but the offender moved out of state and then moved back, and his public profile was taken down after he returned to Utah.

“Coming back to Utah, he was placed on a pending verification status to look at any new offenses and any new additional information from Wyoming. And that began the delay,” Blanchard said. “We should have finished and had him republished much sooner.”