A viral confrontation and a sudden resignation shake up Georgia GOP
A few weeks ago, Angelus Pereira and a small group of friends opened an Instagram account with a singular mission.
After one of his five children was sexually assaulted, Pereira grew convinced other predators were slipping through the cracks in his Athens community and that local police couldn’t keep up.
The concept was straightforward. “I want to know if one of my neighbors is a predator,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Soon Pereira and four friends were posing as a 14-year-old boy on various social media platforms, arranging meetings with adults and posting the confrontations under the handle streetsweeeperztv.
He said they follow strict self-imposed rules: The target had to acknowledge the teen’s purported age, had to initiate the idea of sexual contact and had to orchestrate a meetup. They also, until recently, aimed to confront only people in their 40s or older.
Then Pereira said he encountered a particularly persistent 19-year-old who sought a meeting with “JJ.”
“I stopped messaging him back, but he kept it up,” said Pereira, who shared the back-and-forth online messages with the AJC. “So I said if you’re that eager, let’s do it.”
Pereira recorded the confrontation in the parking lot of an east Athens apartment complex and posted it online.
Only after the video began spreading did he learn from a flood of commenters who the young man apparently was: Ja’Quon Stembridge, a rising figure in Georgia Republican politics and the youngest person ever elected to the state party’s leadership.
Within hours, the fallout began.
Swift reaction
Stembridge hasn’t commented on the video, which has drawn tens of thousands of views and intense online scrutiny. Neither has his attorney, Ron Daniels. Both have declined to answer questions about what unfolded that afternoon despite repeated requests for comment.
But Stembridge abruptly stepped down as the Georgia GOP’s assistant secretary as the video spread, and party chair Josh McKoon quickly moved to distance his organization from the “serious and disturbing” allegations he faces.
“As Mr. Stembridge has resigned from his position within the GAGOP, any further development in this situation is entirely his own affair and does not involve the GAGOP,” he said.
It was a swift fall for an activist once heralded by senior Republicans as a rising party star.
The University of North Georgia student jetted from his college classes to campaigning around the state for a leadership position in the party, winning his post at this summer’s GOP convention on a promise to expand the party’s youth outreach.
He had already founded a Teen Republicans chapter in northeast Georgia and later chaired the statewide youth arm of the party. Now, he has gone silent as the video ricochets across platforms — even as questions mount about Pereira’s methods.
A TV inspiration
Pereira hardly expected to be at the center of a politically explosive controversy.
A native of Oakland, California, he settled in Athens years ago and opened a jewelry store that specialized in intricate, stylized grill mouthpieces. His social media account, which raises money through donations, is now his main source of income.
He said he modeled his account partly based on reruns of “To Catch a Predator,” the NBC series in the 2000s that featured undercover sting operations where men were lured through online chat rooms to houses for what they thought was a meeting with a teenager for sex. Instead, they were confronted on camera before they were arrested.
The show ended in 2008 after one of its operations led to a suicide in Texas. But it has inspired other amateur vigilantes around the country to launch in their own operations, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Pereira said he acts with restraint. He and his four other partners, some also with children victimized by predators, use dating apps where they label themselves as adults but then later claim to be a 14-year-old boy in chat messaging. They message about 30 people a day. The small fraction who respond, he said, have kept his team busy.
In two weeks, he said, his group confronted about eight people, recording and posting each interaction. They also contact authorities, he said, but the response has been tepid at best — giving him the impression police don’t condone the vigilante-style stings.
‘Proud of what we did’
Local law enforcement officials say there’s a reason for that.
Police agencies warn that citizen-run operations can jeopardize investigations, create safety hazards and risk entrapment defenses. They also raise the possibility of misidentification — a wrong name or a misleading edit can ruin a reputation.
Athens-Clarke County Police Lt. Katie Jenkins said the department is aware of Pereira’s viral video but “is not involved in that investigation.” She said her agency follows state guidelines that prohibit them from “promoting or cooperating with vigilante groups or individuals who are not law enforcement.”
Pereira, for his part, acknowledged the danger in what he’s doing. He knows someone could pull a weapon. He knows a planned sting could turn into an ambush. And while he usually arrives with a group, he occasionally goes alone — a risk he admits is unsafe.
He went solo during the confrontation with Stembridge. And when he learned the identity of the man in the viral video, he said he had mixed feelings.
“He had all this good stuff going for him,” he said, adding he was a stew of emotions after he found out who Stembridge was. There was shock, but there was also a deep level of disappointment that he apparently caught someone who was a young leader. Still, he added, he has no regrets.
“You can sue us, you can blame us, you can do whatever you think you can. But as God as my witness, we are proud of what we did.”
About the Author
Greg Bluestein is the Atlanta Journal Constitution's chief political reporter. He is also an author, TV analyst and co-host of the Politically Georgia podcast.
