Mob Rule: Group pickets restaurant over placement of sex offender

Parolee's home is owned by proprietor of Racine eatery; owner of another restaurant leading the protest
BRENDAN O’BRIEN, Journal Times

RACINE — Darcy Powell lives in a gray, nondescript house surrounded by a well-kept yard on a dead-end street.

There is no name on his mailbox. There is no car in the driveway. There is no sunlight that enters his house since the white shades are kept closed and down.

The dwelling he lives in is among four other houses on a roadway on the northwest edge of Kenosha County in the Town of Somers. On the other side of the two-lane road, there is a small basketball hoop in a driveway, a trampoline in a backyard and an assortment of children’s playthings.

Powell, who was convicted of two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child and two counts of incest with a child in 1996, preyed on children for years. He now lives in the clutches of the state’s Chapter 980, a program that binds convicted sex offenders to a tightly supervised life outside of prison.

“He is living in his own little prison,” his mentor, Terry Maack, the deacon of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Kenosha, said Sunday afternoon.

“I can’t talk ... I am not allowed to,” Powell said at his home Sunday.

Maack indicated that Powell, who was released in 2005, is monitored by two tracking bracelets and cannot leave his house without being accompanied by a mentor. He is also given random 3-hour lie detector tests; is not to purchase, possess or consume drugs or alcohol; and is to have no contact with minors, the victims or victims’ families.

“He has 49 regulations that he has to live by, day to day, and he has never missed one fraction. He is trying and he realizes what he did was terrible and horrible,” said Maack, who described Powell as a model parolee. “The man’s penance is going to be for the rest of his life ... losing his family, knowing what he did and being shunned by society.” Full Story