Success Story: Non-compliant Offender Caught in Texas

A 31-year-old Texas man has been sentenced to ten years in prison for failing to register as a sex offender as mandated by state law, according to the Grimes County District Attorney’s Office. Gage Anthony Stringo was sentenced on July 12 of this year after pleading guilty to the charge of failing to register.

Stringo was arrested on November 5, 2023, during a routine encounter with deputies from the Grimes County Sheriff’s Office in Todd Mission, TX. Authorities investigated and discovered that Stringo had not registered since April 2020, despite the fact that he had been sentenced to prison and was required to maintain lifetime registration after his release due to a prior conviction for indecency with a child in Montgomery County.

Sgt. Trey Oldham of the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office noted that Stringo’s case is not unique, but explained how OffenderWatch has helped his county mitigate the strain that many law enforcement agencies face due to non-compliant offenders. 

While Sgt. Oldham acknowledged that some offenders abscond from the area or fail to keep up with the requirements, others face challenges—including homelessness—that can interfere with their ability to register even if they intend to stay compliant. 

“They bounce from place to place a lot of times, so it’s a little bit more difficult to keep up. They face other challenges too, like transportation needs and communication needs to communicate. So that’s a bigger challenge for them and for us,”

Sgt. Oldham noted that all of these issues can strain the resources of agencies that don’t have an integrated system for collecting and sharing sex offender records across jurisdictions because they have to transfer and manage all of their files manually. Manual management processes are not only more time consuming; they also contain more potential failure points for monitoring agencies.

“We have a unique situation and we’re also kind of fortunate when it comes to working with other counties and even other agencies that are out of state [because of OffenderWatch]. If a sex offender is moving from our jurisdiction, say to a jurisdiction in another state that is also an OffenderWatch agency, we can literally pick that sex offender’s profile and hand it over to that partner agency immediately,” Sgt. Oldham said. “So it makes the transition a lot smoother and a lot faster. For non-OffenderWatch agencies, of course, they would have to do things in a manual way. So they would have to either mail records or email records individually,” 

Thanks to OffenderWatch and the active efforts of the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office to regularly monitor offenders and verify their addresses more efficiently, Sgt. Oldham pointed out that Brazos County has succeeded in keeping non-compliance rates very low. Many experts conclude that minimizing non-compliance is key to preventing repeat offenses.

 “I think that the biggest goal of the sex offender program is to make sure that sex offenders are accounted for. We know where they’re at at all times,” Sgt. Oldham said. 

Currently, there are nearly 800,000 individuals throughout the United States who have been placed on a sex offender registry, with the state of Texas alone accounting for approximately 100,000 of that total.

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