A convicted sex offender residing in Porter was booked into the Porter County Jail on April 3 on a charge of child molesting, two counts, the Porter County Sheriff’s Police said.

Jackie W. Robson, 48, with a listed address of 1010 Waverly Road, was arrested at 3 p.m., police said, on a Class A felony count and a Class C felony count, both accusing him of molesting a child younger than 14.

Class A felonies are punishable by a term of 20 to 50 years; Class C, by a term of two to eight years.

Robson was convicted on Feb. 23, 2009, of vicarious sexual gratification, sentenced to three years in the Indiana Department of Correction with all but 90 days suspended, and released on May 14, 2009.

According to the probable cause affidavit filed by Det. Gene Hopkins of the PCSP, on July 22, 2011, a Porter County mother reported that her daughter, on the previous night, had told her of twice being inappropriately touched by Robson: the first time at Robson’s residence, when she was visiting a friend; the second time at her own home, when Robson’s wife was visiting her mother.

On the first occasion—alleged to have occurred sometime between Jan. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2010—Robson walked into the room where she was visiting her friend, exposed himself to both girls, and then touched her. Robson “said he wanted to do something to them . . . that would feel good,” the girl advised Hopkins. “He told the girls that he would not tell their mothers, either.”

The girl’s friend, when interviewed, denied the girl’s allegation. “When I asked her to tell me what happened,” Hopkins stated, “she looked down at the floor and eventually said ‘I’m scared.’ She then said that (Robson) doesn’t touch her or her friends. I asked her who told her to say that and she replied her mom had. . . . I asked her what else her mom told her to say, when (the girl’s friend) just shrugged her shoulders and said ‘I just know he doesn’t do it.’”

Robson, for his part, “denied the accusations of touching the two girls,” Hopkins stated.

Posted 4/10/2012