Twenty-One Custody Names and a Prosecutor’s Review: Inside Snohomish County’s Operation Guardian
Twenty-one people were taken into custody in Snohomish County in the last week of June, and the Washington State Patrol put their names on a public sheet before most of them had a formal charging document. The operation was called Operation Guardian. It was run out of Edmonds by the patrol’s Missing and Exploited Children Task Force, the state’s affiliate of the Internet Crimes Against Children program. By the afternoon of July 1, local newsrooms had the release, a booking-style list, and a promise that the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office would decide which cases, if any, become criminal charges.
That last sentence is the part that still governs the story. An arrest in a chat-based sting is not a conviction. It is not even, by itself, a filed information. The patrol’s July 1 announcement said the multi-day effort identified people allegedly involved in the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, and that prosecutors would review the files. As of late September, the patrol has not published a follow-up sheet pairing each name with a filed charge. Readers looking for a scoreboard of guilty pleas will not find one in the public release. What they will find is a custody list, a statute menu, and a task force that says it has been doing this work since August 2015.
What the patrol says the week was built to catch
The release, dated June 30 and posted the next day, lists the primary crimes investigators were working. They are Washington statutes, not slogans: attempted rape of a child in the first degree, attempted rape of a child in the second degree, commercial sexual abuse of a minor, communication with a minor for immoral purposes, sexual exploitation of a minor, and unlawful possession of a firearm. The Lynnwood Times also reported that some booking records carried a controlled-substance count for distributing methamphetamine to a minor. That extra line does not appear in the patrol’s statute list. It is a reminder that jail paperwork and a press release are not the same document.
Chief John Batiste said detectives worked with local and federal partners to identify and arrest people who prey on the most vulnerable, and that protecting children from exploitation is one of the most important jobs law enforcement has. Assistant Chief Josh McClure of the Edmonds Police Department said the city was proud to host the base of operations and called the week an extraordinary demonstration of collaborative public safety. Those sentences are the official frame. They do not describe what any one suspect typed, what any undercover account said, or whether a particular meeting ever happened. KING 5’s coverage of the week said detectives posed as children online and that meetings were arranged across southern Snohomish County, including public parks in Mountlake Terrace and a church parking lot in Edmonds. The station also said it would not name people who had not been formally charged. The patrol did name them. Both choices are editorial. Only a court file will sort which conversations a jury is allowed to hear.
The custody list, as the patrol published it
The ages on the sheet run from 22 to 65. The Seattle Times used that range and stopped there. The patrol went further. Taken into custody, in the order the release gives them: Remington Le, 23, of Lake Stevens; Guillermo Mejian Perez, 22, of Shoreline; Karl Walker, 60, of Mountlake Terrace; Paul Hansen, 65, of Kirkland; Angel Luna, 63, of Mountlake Terrace; Jose Anaya Beltran, 37, of Lynnwood; Hector Marroquin Herrera, 31, of Lynnwood; Ishan Budhathoki, 28, of Seattle; Carlos Lara Maddigales, 34, of Mountlake Terrace; Humberto Hernandez-Hernandez, 38, of Lynnwood; Jimy De Paz Perez, 24, of Burien; Hector Galvez Quevedo, 44, of Shoreline; Daniel Martinez, 52, of El Paso, Texas; Antonio Yepes Ponce, 37, of Zapotitlan De Vadillo, Mexico; Seyram Dogbey, 32, of Ridgeland, Mississippi; Nicholas Dale, 30, of Lynnwood; Hanzel Paningbatan, 38, of Everett; Dillon Wade, 28, of Arlington; Anthony Morales Velasco, 28, of Glennwood, using the patrol’s spelling; Asim Bera, 56, of Seattle; and Benjamin Lopez Sanchez, 28, of Tacoma.
None of those names is a finding of guilt. Several live well outside Snohomish County. Two are listed with hometowns in other states, and one with a town in Mexico. That spread is what an internet-crimes operation looks like when the chat is the meeting place and the arrest is arranged for a parking lot. It is also why a single police department cannot run the week alone.
Thirty agencies, one task force, and a firefighter on leave
The patrol’s partner list is long on purpose. It includes the Edmonds, Bothell, Everett, Fife, Kirkland, Lakewood, Lake Stevens, Lynnwood, Marysville, Mountlake Terrace, Monroe, Mukilteo, Othello, Post Falls, Puyallup, Redmond, Renton, Tacoma, and Washougal police departments, the Seattle Police Department, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office, the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office, the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, the Washington State Department of Corrections, and the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office. Ward Media noted the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office among the out-of-county hands. Post Falls is in Idaho. The geography is the point: the chat does not stop at a county line, and neither did the roster.
One name on the list drew a second story. The Herald reported that Dillon Wade, 28, of Arlington, a Marysville Fire District firefighter, was booked into the Snohomish County Jail on June 30 on a felony allegation of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes. Jail records cited by the paper put his bond at $100,000. He posted it and was released on July 2. The fire district said it knew about the serious allegation, and it placed him on administrative leave pending the investigation. A booking charge is still an allegation. It is also the only Operation Guardian name, so far, that a local employer has had to explain in public.
The patrol says that since the task force’s first operation in August 2015, the legislatively funded unit has netted nearly 400 arrests and removed numerous children from danger. That cumulative number is the context for a week that produced 21 custodies. It is not a claim that 400 cases ended in prison. Task-force arithmetic counts interventions. Court arithmetic counts charges, pleas, trials, and dismissals. Those columns do not move at the same speed.
Why the charging desk matters more than the headline
Sting cases live or die on the transcript. Washington criminalizes an attempt to rape a child, and it criminalizes communication with a minor for immoral purposes, including when the “minor” is an officer. That legal structure is why these operations exist. It is also why a careful prosecutor reads the chat before signing a charge. Did the officer state an age? Did the suspect agree to a sex act with someone described as that age? Was there a gun in the car when officers made the stop, which would explain the firearm statute sitting on the same list? Did anyone actually meet a child, or was the entire offense the agreement to meet? The patrol has not published those distinctions name by name. Until it does, or until the prosecutor files, the honest public record is the custody list and the menu of statutes.
People with information about the people named, or about victims who might be connected to the cases, were pointed by the patrol to me***@****wa.gov. The sentence on the patrol’s page says “METCF” and then gives the mailbox mectf. Use the mailbox as printed. Tips are how a task force built on chats finds the cases that are not chats, the ones in which a real child was already being harmed.
That is the same reason a sting week should not be covered as if it cleaned a county. The AEGIS Alliance has spent years on the cases that do not arrive as a parking-lot arrest, from the networks described as hiding in plain sight to the account takedowns that barely made a national newscast. A New Jersey sweep branded Operation Bad Santa produced charges, not just bookings. Operation Guardian, three months after the Edmonds week, is still mostly a booking story. That is not a criticism of the detectives. It is a description of where the paper stands.
What a reader can say without getting ahead of the court
It is fair to say that more than 30 agencies spent days in and around Edmonds on internet crimes against children. It is fair to say 21 people were taken into custody, that their ages ran from 22 to 65, and that the patrol published the names. It is fair to say prosecutors in Snohomish County were handed the files. It is not fair to say all 21 have been convicted, or that each person faces the same count, or that a firefighter’s administrative leave is a finding. The presumption of innocence applies to every name on that sheet until a court says otherwise.
The useful next document is not another recap of the press release. It is a charging decision, a dismissal, or a quiet return of the file. Anyone watching the crime desk or the U.S. news file at The AEGIS Alliance should treat Operation Guardian as open. The task force has nearly a decade of arrests behind it. This particular week still has to survive a prosecutor’s read of the chats.
