Luther Elvis Snellgrove thought he was meeting a 15-year-old girl while on break at his job at Food Depot on Sunday afternoon.
Snellgrove, 50, walked around the side of the building and prepared for the meet-up. Instead, however, Snellgrove was confronted by ThePredHunters, an online vigilante group that works to identify potential child predators.
ThePredHunters, after recording a video of the encounter, contacted the Milledgeville Police Department, and an officer responded to Food Depot. Snellgrove was detained, interviewed and ultimately arrested and charged with one count of enticing a child for indecent purposes. Snellgrove had no previous criminal history in Baldwin County.
Bradon Sellers, MPD’s chief of detectives, said that online vigilante groups such as ThePredHunters “have good intentions.” At the same time, however, Sellers said he wishes the groups would give detectives a heads up sooner.
“They don’t call us until after they get their gotcha moment and until after it’s over,” Seller said. “If they’d let us know sooner, we could make stronger cases and perhaps make further cases.”
Sunday marked the fourth encounter involving an online vigilante group and a potential child predator around Milledgeville in the last eight months, three of which have led to arrests. The incident that didn’t lead to an arrest “had some entrapment issues and some other issues,” according to Sellers.
“We presented our (case file) to the District Attorney’s office, and they agreed that it wasn’t enough,” he said.
“We can’t use all of the same tools that (the online vigilante groups) use.
For example, they were sending some photos that they probably shouldn’t have been sending (in the incident that didn’t led to an arrest). One of the producers told me after it was over that ‘we tricked him into going to a different chat site.’ It’s a different set of rules.”
ThePredHunters, at last check, had 365,000 subscribers and more than 31 million video views.