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Suicide raises questions of notification

A disabled man with a past as a sex offender is outed by neighbors.

OCALA - For nearly four years, Chuckie Claxton lived anonymously amid the horse pastures and moss-draped oaks of the Florida Orange Groves subdivision. Then the crimes of others drew attention to his own.

In the statewide outrage over the arrests of sex offenders in the killings of two girls, someone in the Groves went to the state Web site to see if any sex offenders were living in the neighborhood.

That person - authorities don't know who - found an entry about Claxton's molestation of a girl 15 years ago and blanketed the neighborhood with dozens of fliers.

The poster didn't mention that the 5-foot-9, 135-pound Claxton must use a wheelchair, that police no longer considered him a serious threat and that he had no further sex offenses. But the flier's creator saw fit to add at the bottom of the page, in bold block letters, "CHILD RAPIST."

Four days after the fliers appeared, 38-year-old Chuckie Claxton was dead, an empty bottle of scotch, a bag of pills and one of the posters beside him.

"This pushed him over the edge," his grieving father said.

Florida is a state suddenly preoccupied with the notion of sexual deviates lurking in scary proximity to children. Volusia County is closing school bus stops near the homes of registered offenders. Miami Beach is considering nearly half-mile buffer zones around schools to essentially ban sex offenders from the city. And Monday Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation allowing lifelong electronic monitoring of certain sexual predators.

In all this flurry, Claxton's suicide has cast a gray shadow over what to many is a black-and-white issue.

A flu vaccination at age 10 led to a viral infection that put the avid Cub Scout into a coma. Clovis Ivan Claxton III awoke to a world of wheelchairs and leg braces, seizures and epilepsy - in which, Jane and Chuck Claxton said, mentally he would be forever a boy.

In 1991, prosecutors in Tacoma, Wash., charged the then-24-year-old Claxton with two counts of first-degree child rape. Police say Claxton took his caretaker's 6-year-old daughter up to the attic on several occasions and had oral sex with her.

Claxton pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of first-degree child molestation and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

Following his release, Claxton had twice-monthly sessions with a therapist.

"His offense appeared to be opportunistic, rather than one involving a cyclical pattern of offending," psychologist Sally Wing wrote to corrections officials in 1994.

In late 2001, the family moved to just outside Ocala.

Despite constant struggles with alcohol and drugs, Chuckie Claxton was a "good kid" with a kind heart, his father said.

In recent months, things began looking up. After years of fruitless applications, Medicaid had finally authorized a motorized three-wheeled scooter for Claxton. Whereas before a trip to the mailbox left him exhausted, he could now ride around the neighborhood without asking his parents for help.

"He was so happy," his father said.

Until April 18.

Claxton and his mother were returning from a grocery store when they noticed a bright yellow poster on a telephone pole near their home. On it were his mug shot, his description, address and arrest history.

Following the recent high-profile killings of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford and 13-year-old Sarah Lunde, Marion Sheriff Ed Dean instituted a program of monthly face-to-face visits with all registered offenders. Deputies had checked in on Claxton in late March; the visit went well.

The following day, Claxton saw another flier while riding his scooter down the road - this one with the "CHILD RAPIST" warning.

Distraught, Claxton called the Sheriff's Office, concerned that his neighbors were "out to possibly harm him" and saying he "just wanted to end it all."

Claxton was involuntarily committed, but was released after about 12 hours with a prescription for anxiety medication.

That evening, a friend came over to comfort Claxton. What the Claxtons didn't know was that the friend had taken their son to buy a half-gallon bottle of scotch.

On April 21, around 6:30 a.m., Chuck Claxton went to make sure his son was getting ready; he had an appointment to be fitted with new braces for his painfully twisted ankles. He found his son lying on his right side, fully clothed.

"He was cold."

On the day Claxton called the Sheriff's Office, County Commissioner Randy Harris introduced a proposal to put up metal signs in neighborhoods where sexual offenders and predators live. "If anyone construes him a victim, he's a victim of his own circumstance," Harris said.

Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said what happened in the Claxton case was "dangerously close" to vigilantism.

"The fact of the matter is, they will live in our communities," she said. "There aren't enough spaces in prison. . . . So we must look at the best approaches to dealing with this instead of giving in to hysteria."

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:45:19]