Published Tuesday, August 8, 2006
GROPING SUSPECT
Chase Driven by 'Natural Instinct'
By Gabrielle Finley
The Ledger
LAKELAND -- Chris Goflin and his children were waiting in their minivan in a Publix parking lot while his wife finished lastminute shopping for school supplies Sunday evening.
Then, a throng of people darted out the front door. They were chasing a man.
Out of curiosity, Goflin circled the store on Griffin Road, then met up with his wife, who told him she and an 8-year-old girl had just been groped by a man in the grocery store.
The mother of the 8-year-old told police her daughter was standing in one of the store's snack aisles when a man, later identified as Charles William Hunter III, grabbed her daughter's buttocks, Lakeland police said.
Hunter is a registered sex offender who was convicted in 1996 of committing a lewd and lascivious act on a child younger than 16, according to the state's sex offender Web site.
The girl, crying and "hysterical," told her mother the man grabbed her, then pointed Hunter out to her mother, according to a police report.
Hunter ran toward the front of the store and on the way, bumped into Amy Goflin and grabbed her buttocks as he passed, the police report said.
Publix workers, alerted to the incident, ran out the door after Hunter. What happened next, Goflin said, was a father's instinct.
"My wife was crying and said a man grabbed her, then she turned around and told me that the guy grabbed a girl," Goflin said during a phone interview Monday night.
Goflin saw where the man was headed. He told his wife to get into the van, and they followed the man.
"We happened to see him walking in the road when he noticed us," Goflin said.
Goflin stopped the van, got out and chased Hunter to the nearby Highlands Fairway Golf Course, where he tackled Hunter, he said.
While Amy Goflin dialed 911, her husband pinned Hunter to the ground.
"He said he didn't mean to do it . . . he said he was just drunk. He said he had a wife and a baby on the way," Goflin said. "I told him I didn't want to talk to him and the cops were on their way."
"It's kind of like a natural instinct," Goflin said of the chase. "You've got to protect children."
Hunter was charged with lewd and lascivious molestation of a child, said LPD Lt. John Thomason.
Hunter also was charged with simple battery and resisting arrest without violence, the report said.
Hunter also could face shoplifting charges, Thomason said.
Police said he ran out of the store with a couple of $25 steaks.
Gabrielle Finley can be reached at
gabrielle.finley@theledger.com or 863-802-7590.
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