Don: We need to put sex predators away forever

A high-risk sex offender who fled Canada for Seattle has been arrested in the rape of a 69-year-old woman in Skyway. Many are saying this wasn’t a surprise and more should be done to keep offenders like this locked up.

“We all knew this was going to happen, and it happened, and it makes us all furious,” said KIRO Radio’s Ron & Don Show host Don O’Neill.

Michael Sean Stanley, 49, made news reports in 2013 when he cut off an electronic-monitoring ankle bracelet and crossed the U.S. border unchallenged. He’s a U.S. citizen, and American authorities said they had no reason to arrest him. Canada decided not to ask for his extradition, and he registered in Seattle as a sex offender.

Related: Sex offender who illegally crossed border from Canada charged with burglary, rape

Stanley, formerly of Edmonton, had a criminal record in Canada that dated back 25 years. Before he fled, he had most recently served 32 months for luring two mentally challenged boys into an apartment, lighting a crack pipe, blowing smoke in their faces and then sexually assaulting them. Parole board documents also described a case in which Stanley broke into an elderly woman’s apartment while she was sleeping and sexually assaulted her.

Co-host Ron Upshaw said he can understand Canada not wanting to bring Stanley back.

“I can see Canada’s point of view going, ‘Hey, this is not a Canadian citizen,'” said Ron. “‘If he goes back to the United States, that’s one more prisoner off of our books. Let him go back to where he came from.'”

But Don thinks their decision not to follow up on such a criminal speaks volumes about how seriously people take such crimes.

“What if he would have murdered someone in Canada? They would have taken him back,” said Don. “For whatever reason, I don’t know if it’s just Western culture, the way we look at crimes against women, and crimes against children, and crimes against the elderly. It’s just sort of like, ah, it’s just the rape of a 69-year-old. That’s the way our criminal justice system looks at that.”

Don said this isn’t just a Canada problem. He thinks the U.S. doesn’t come down as hard as they should on sex offenders. If you want to know how many have been released, he said just look up your neighborhood on the state’s sex offender database.

“It will make you want to take you and your kids and never leave the house because it’s amazing how many sexual predators are out there among us,” said Don. “We don’t take it seriously and the sentences aren’t serious.”

King County Sheriff’s Sgt. BJ Myers told KIRO Radio that Stanley’s sex offender level indicated he was in a class likely to re-offend.

“Stanley is a Level III sex offender, which is our highest level of classification, meaning he’s the most likely to re-offend based on the conviction data we have on him,” said Myers.

The King County Sheriff’s Office said Stanley was arrested Saturday morning after entering the woman’s home through a window. No weapons were used, but the victim sustained what the sheriff’s office described as minor injuries.

Prior to that, authorities said, Stanley had been meeting his requirements as registered sex offender, including checking in weekly as required and providing an accurate account of where he was staying each night.

Myers said he was also in jail for a good portion of the time he’s been in the U.S.

“Of the 73 weeks that I count over that period of time, he had spent about 52 weeks in jail.”

Stanley ran into trouble soon after arriving in Seattle in fall 2013. He was arrested on misdemeanor charges of harassment and resisting arrest after he threatened someone who asked him to be quiet. He was sentenced to seven months in jail.

According to court documents, Stanley also was convicted of burglary in the second degree in December 2014 for breaking into a nursing home. He was released Feb. 21, just six days before the offense was committed in the most recent burglary and rape case in which he stands accused.

Don doesn’t believe it should take this litany of crimes to keep an offender like this locked up.

“I know there’s a lot of prosecutors that I’ve personally talked to that would like to throw the book at these guys,” said Don. “The problem is, the book isn’t thick enough, it’s not big enough and we need to put these predators away forever.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.