Homeless sex offenders living in woods near Marietta told to leave

By Mary Lou Pickel

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A group of homeless sex offenders who had been living in tents in the woods behind an office park near Marietta were told they had to leave the land by Tuesday.

“We don’t want to allow anyone to live on our property for liability issues,” said Mark McKinnon, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Transportation, which owns the wooded land where the sex offenders had taken residence.

Several men said their probation officers had told them about the encampment as a kind of last resort for homeless sex offenders trying to meet the strict residency requirements of their probation.

Georgia’s law prohibits the state’s 16,000 sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, child care facilities and other areas where children gather. It limits the locations where they can live.

Registered offender Marque Miechurski, 30, said sheriff’s deputies came by Monday evening and gave them 24 hours to leave and another 72 hours to check in with their probation officer and list their new address. “I found a place I can temporarily go — a place I can rest my head,” Miechurski said as he packed up his tent.

William Hawkins, 34, a registered sex offender living in the camp, gathered his belongings Tuesday.

He’s not sure where he’s going to go.

When Hawkins was 15 years old, he had sex with a 12-year-old in Florida and received two years of house arrest and 10 years’ probation. “I have a 19-year-old case. Technically, I don’t think I have to be on it,” Hawkins said of the sex offender registry.

But in Cobb County, he learned he was supposed to have registered with the state as a sex offender. Hawkins had a series of missteps registering and wound up in jail for a year in Georgia, he said.

He got out in September, and his probation officer wrote the address of the office park on a Post-it note, saying the encampment of homeless sex offenders was in the woods nearby

“I walked to Wal-Mart, bought a tent and made a little place to live. That’s how much I don’t want to violate probation,” said Hawkins, whose wife of five years lives in Virginia.

He can’t live with her because he can’t transfer his probation, he said.