If you find that strangers are a little less willing to offer a helping hand on your bicycle tour this summer, you can probably thank David Earl McCarthy.
McCarthy is a 53-year-old registered sex offender from Oregon whose bicycle touring trail has ended in Kentucky, where he was staying with a family on their farm.
The Kentucky family contacted police when they discovered he was cruising Internet pornography sites on their home computer. Authorities checked out his story and discovered he wasn't a retired Coast Guard officer and US Marshal from Alaska as he had claimed, but a sex offender with four convictions, 2 in Oregon and 1 each in North Carolina and Louisiana.
According to an Associated Press story, McCarthy is in a south-central Kentucky jail on charges of impersonating an officer. A prosecutor said state police are seeking the assistance of the FBI in the case.
The Kentucky family, with 3 children, let McCarthy camp at their farm after a relative had a chat with him at a gas station. The cyclist said he was on bicycle tour to heal after his wife and child were killed by a drunken driver. He had lots of stories from his adventures and had been scheduled to speak to pupils at a local school.
McCarthy carried a scrapbook full of newspaper articles from his bike tour to back up his story.
One such article that appeared in the Dublin Courier Herald in January, reports:
“…he has become more like a modern day Forrest Gump, attracting all kinds of attention as he pedals across the U.S. McCarthy is a retired Lt. Commander with 30 years of service in the U.S. Coast Guard and a firefighter in his hometown of Gnome (sic), Alaska. Like Forest, McCarthy has been chased by news reporters in almost every location he's been through. He's been on Good Morning America, in countless newspapers and next month he will be on the cover of National Geographic.”
Who knows how much of that was true. Three months later, the same reporter wrote in “Cross-country cyclists' story a hoax” that a Georgia family helped him out to the tune of about $300 before he left. The local firefighters also let him stay at the station, instead of camping in his tent, to get out of the cold night air.
The man in Kentucky who helped out McCarthy by letting him camp on his property told the AP:
“I can honestly say that that as far as helping and putting people up on our property – that would be something that would not be done again.”
The Oregon Sex Offender Inquiry System classifies McCarthy as a predator who targets teenage males and has been known to threaten victims with a knife. He has four convictions, dating back to 1979. He's 6-foot-3 and weighs 199 pounds.
McCarthy is being held on two felony charges of impersonating a federal officer and failing to register as a sex offender, Kentucky state police Det. Tony Wells told the Dublin Courier Journal.
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