Staffordshire Paedophile Chris Brown was enlisted to aid with the relocation, but his actual identity was revealed to ‘Laurie’ only after he issued a Facebook friend request to her daughter.
A distressed mother has criticised her landlord and the police after a registered child sex offender, Chris Brown, was assigned to assist her and her five children with their relocation. A woman identifying herself solely as Laurie was transitioning between Aspire Housing apartments in North Staffordshire when Chris Brown was enlisted to provide assistance.
According to Stoke Sentinel, she became aware of the man’s genuine name after he sent her daughter a friend request on Facebook the same day. The mother believes that the reactions from both Aspire and Staffordshire Police over the incident have significantly undermined her trust in them.
During the move, Chris Brown was subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) that he received in 2017, aged 29. Chris Brown had been jailed for two years after exchanging explicit images with a 13-year-old boy.
Chris Brown, who remains on the Sex Offenders Register, was back in court in August 2021 for breaching the order by deleting Snapchat messages. He told StokeonTrentLive that he had reason to believe from previous conversations with the girl that she was over the age of 18, which is a claim that Laurie strongly rejects.
Laurie, 33, who has four other young children living with her at home, said: “I’m baffled that the police seem to think that if someone just tells them they thought someone was over 18, that’s good enough for them. They haven’t investigated this properly at all as far as I’m concerned. They took no statements from me or my daughter, they seem to have taken his word for it and left it at that. It’s disgusting.”
Chris Brown was helping out local removal firm Bailey and Cooper Removals, which is owned by his stepfather, when he was sent out to the woman’s home. Laurie contacted the police after the Facebook friend request for her daughter arrived the next day.
She said: “I rang them and later they came back to me to say they’d been round to check his devices. That told me something was up, so I asked if that meant what I thought it meant, but they wouldn’t say. So we looked him up on Google and found out about his court cases.
“I was sick to my stomach. All they would say was that they’d been to see him and that everything was ok as far as they were concerned. They were going on about ‘having a duty of care to him’ and all that.”
Staffordshire Police confirmed to StokeonTrentLive that it had visited Chris Brown, and that there had been no breach of his SHPO. It’s been reported that the now-expired SHPO imposed by the court did not forbid him from making contact with all children and was only applicable to boys under 18.
Laurie who found this ‘astonishing’ said: “Why would anyone impose an order that only protected boys, not girls as well? These orders should be made with the protection of all children in mind.”
It is understood that Chris Brown’s SHPO was not extended when he breached it in 2021. A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police said: “At the time of the incident, the individual was subject to a SHPO that only applied to boys aged under 18. The judge set these terms at the time of the previous court hearing.
“Following the allegations, we visited the individual on August 4, 2022, to conduct inquiries. The relevant officer spoke to the girl’s mother later the same day. No criminal offences were identified as part of our enquiries. We can only base our investigations on the evidence we have available and within the constraints of the court order issued, this particular incident does not meet the criteria for the breach of that order.”
When asked about the incident, Chris Brown said: “With regard to the matter last August – yes, in the course of helping out on the job, the woman and daughter started conversations with me, and the daughter gave me the impression by what she said that she was over 18.”
Aspire Housing said that the removal firm’s remit did not meet the criteria for a background disclosure check. Jon Dickin, Head of Neighbourhoods at Aspire Housing, said: “We have taken this incident very seriously and have been providing support to the customer and working with local partner organisations to help investigate the situation.
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