Sex offender arrested in SLCC incident

A scared little girl's screams and quick police work at Salt Lake Community College's South City Campus probably kept a bad situation from getting worse Thursday.

Just after 4 p.m., a 10-year-old girl and her 7-year-old friend, a boy, were using the campus' public computer room to play video games when a man using the computer next to her "befriended her," said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Jayson McCleve. He said the children decided they needed to use the restroom, and the man accompanied them down the hall, letting the 7-year-old boy into the men's restroom along the way.

"Our video surveillance shows him (the man) walking into the women's restroom after her," McCleve said. "She said he grabbed her butt."

The little girl screamed and scared the man out of the restroom, and he ran out of the building located at 1700 S. State, all of which was caught on camera.

McCleve said the girl showed police which computer the man had been using, and the technology staff pulled up the man's search history, revealing no illegal searches but one page where the man had entered his phone number.

The phone number was traced to a name, which was then cross-referenced with a database of driver's license photographs on file with the state's Division of Motor Vehicles. The photographs were then matched to the video surveillance captured earlier, and police were led to the home of a 36-year-old convicted sex offender.

"He denied it even after seeing the video," McCleve said. "He said he didn't mean to touch her."

Michael Joseph Bradley was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of aggravated sexual abuse of a minor and attempted kidnapping, McCleve said.

In 1995, Bradley was convicted in Utah for attempted sodomy on a child, a first-degree felony. Bradley is currently on parole from that conviction.

McCleve said Bradley has a previous record from Connecticut dating to 1986 and 1987. He also had an outstanding arrest warrant issued by that state.

---

E-mail: wleonard@desnews.com