On April 24, a jury found convicted child molester Paul James Kerr guilty of failing to register as a sex offender, sending him back to jail.
On Sept. 20, 2013, Kerr was booked into jail after Aurora detectives realized he hadn’t registered at the address in that city where he told police he would be living, following his earlier release from jail on Aug. 14, 2013.
“What we asked of Paul Kerr is to tell us how to find him. That’s all we ask,” said prosecutor Amy Ferrin. “He didn’t follow the rules.”
Defense attorney Angela Colaiuta suggested Kerr might have registered in a different jurisdiction, despite the fact that he didn’t show up on the statewide database.
“They’re essentially trying to prove a negative,” she told Judge Kurt Horton, asking him to acquit due to insufficient evidence. He declined, sending the case on to the jury.
Kerr declined to testify during the trial, as his mother and the mother of one of his victims looked on.
Kerr was originally arrested in April 2011, when he was a lead teacher at the KinderCare at 5472 S. Federal Circle in Littleton. A 9-year-old girl told her parents that Kerr touched her sexually under the guise of checking her for physical abuse, and Littleton police found out about crimes against two other girls during the investigation.
Kerr had garnered a plea deal that required him to participate in Sex Offender Intensive Supervised Probation for four years and to spend 10 years on probation. As part of the deal, he confessed to the abuse.
The program required Kerr to undergo treatment and routine polygraphs and have no unapproved contact with children. It also imposed curfews and geographic boundaries.
The felony would have been dismissed if he had been successful in the program, but Ferrin said she expected the new guilty verdict would also result in the revocation of Kerr’s probation. Sentencing was set for May 29.
Kerr, 35, had worked at the day care since July 2010, and prior to that had been an elementary-school substitute teacher in the Jefferson County and Denver school districts since 2005. Before coming to Colorado, he was a summer church-camp counselor in Branson, Mo., from 1997 to 2005.