Machine Gun Predator
At first glance, Nicholas Cocos didn't seem like the type to fit into this sort of "hardened" group. Born on September 13th, 1980, he was 25 at the time of the sting but looked younger. Using the screen name "whittierwannado," a reference to the fact that he lived in Whittier, California, he contacted the decoy in a series of brief chats between January 4th and January 8th, 2006. He was one of numerous men, including Walter Babst, to have a conversation with "bubblebeth2005," who claimed to be a girl of just 12 named, well, Beth. His conversation was among the less graphic of the men caught in the show, but it was still harmful to a young child, obviously wrong, and quite illegal. It also raises the possibility that men like Cocos know what to avoid saying in a conversation and simply want to make themselves seem harmless to get a child to consent to a meet.
He focused on things like movies, pizza, and sweatpants at first, but he soon moved to the subject of kissing, saying he "like[d it]," and asked the girl if she was a virgin. He called the girl and drove to the sting house on the final day of the sting, never once seeming to acknowledge that meeting a girl half his age online was wrong or illegal. This continued as he showed up at the Mira Loma house on the final day of the sting. Wearing his Mickey Mouse shirt and necklace, he was interviewed by Chris Hansen, where he seemed to believe that the lesson to draw from his arrest was that people should be careful to avoid online decoys and not that people should not solicit children online. His interview was not featured in the episode but would later be released in its entirety, among several others.
Cocos was arrested at the same time a number of other men were arriving, being shepherded by sheriff's deputies into the trailer parked next door with fellow predator Jerry Wayne Martin-Kosis. He was told to be quiet so they could continue making arrests, and, according to Lieutenant Chad Bianco, complied. This story would be a more mild one if it were not for what happened after Nick Cocos was released on bond and worked his way through the legal system. He was arrested in a raid for running an illegal credit card operation later in the year and was found with a submachine gun in his possession. He served a year in prison for these crimes before being convicted of attempted lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 and being sentenced to 18 months in prison in February 2008. He was released later that year after serving the entirety of his credit and gun sentence and the majority of his sex crime sentence. He also had to register as a sex offender.
Nick Cocos has since been removed from the sex offender registry after being on it for roughly a decade. In 2017, he sparked a conversation in the TCAP community when he posted images of himself with a new pet parakeet online, drawing puns related to the "man on the wing" as well as comparisons to "the man with the bird on his head," fellow predator Kevin Westerbeck. Other than this, all that is known is that he has not reoffended; he has been a relatively elusive predator. He had a less graphic chat and was also involved in numerous other crimes at the time unrelated to sex, so we can only hope that he was simply being idiotic at the time and the serious time he spent in prison was enough to change him for the better (Kevin Westerbeck pun).
Sources:
Comments
Post a Comment