We teach our kids to stay away from strangers, to beware of that big van handing out free puppies. But predators are much closer than ever before.

Local sheriff’s departments around the state a responsible for keeping tabs on the state’s registered sex offenders.

For the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, address verification tact plans are routine.

“I don’t want to jinx us,” said Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Detective Felipe Haynes. Haynes said address verification checks are usually uneventful, as was the case when KOB shadowed detectives in late April.

Throughout the year, deputies take a list of names and pay a surprise visit to every registered sex offender in the county.

They’re making sure those offenders are living at their registered address. Detective Glenn Metzger is with the sex offender registration unit known as SORNA.

“The point is to make sure the community has the information, [to] know who is living in their community, identify where offenders may reside or may be working and let their families know of this information and be able to warn their children of any potential safety issues,” said Metzger.

Metzger and fellow detectives like Felipe Haynes are the first line of defense in a system built for accountability.

A system they hope keeps sex offenders from re-offending and most of the time, they said, it works.

“Most of your sex offenders are not that welcomed in jail. So, they don’t want to go back,” said Detective Felipe Haynes.

But there is a name that’s not on their Bernalillo County list, or in any public database.

“How is he a sex offender, but it’s not available to public?” said Jessica Paul.

Jessica Paul lives in southwest Albuquerque. She said she found out about 29-year-old Jonathan Giaquinto only after he sexually assaulted her 13-year-old daughter.

“It was Valentine’s Day,” she said. “I will never forget Valentine’s Day.”

That’s when she discovered a Snapchat trail. Investigators said her 13-year-old daughter was exchanging sexually graphic messages with a user named “gigidy gogitttt.”

After months of what Paul calls grooming, those explicit messages turned physical.

In the middle of the night, investigators said Giaquinto drove more than an hour from his home in Grants, New Mexico to pick her daughter up and take her to a park where investigators said he raped her.

Paul’s home surveillance camera caught her daughter sneaking out, then back in. She got the alert when it happened, but it wasn’t until after he was caught that she figured out what she was looking at.

“I literally felt sick to my stomach,” said Paul. “How could you have done that to my daughter?”

Jonathan Giaquinto is a registered sex offender. But his charges went undetected. While he was current on his registration in Cibola County, his information was not searchable by the public.

The New Mexico Department of Public Safety:

• Jonathan Giaquinto
  • Conviction date: Oct. 5, 2023 (Military court)
  • Probation completed: Feb. 26, 2024
  • Registration requirement: Semi-annually for 10 years, ending Dec. 31, 2034
  • Current registration jurisdiction: Cibola County, NM

He’s not listed in the national database of sex offenders.

“I’m sure that wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but then maybe it would have,” said Paul. “Maybe he would have been afraid to continue to do what he was doing.”

Army records show a military court convicted Giaquinto roughly a year before he’s alleged to have preyed on her daughter. An Army judge found him guilty of sending sexually enticing messages to a child near where he was stationed in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The Army discharged him for bad conduct and required Giaquinto to register as a sex offender.

There are certain crimes in New Mexico that require sex offender registration but are not subject to public disclosure.

Giaquinto’s prior conviction for Sexual Abuse of a Child by Communication, translates to Child Solicitation by Electronic Communication Device under New Mexico law.

A spokesperson for NMDPS said while “this offense requires the individual to register as a sex offender semi-annually for ten years, it falls under a category of “non-publishable” offenses.

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We discovered of the nearly 3500 registered sex offenders in the state, close to 700 of them are shielded from public view.

That’s not counting the more than a dozen people we found in Bernalillo County who were non-compliant with their sex offender registration this year. People who don’t register or live where they say they will. Predators who could be anywhere, making the work of detectives Metzger and Haynes all the more critical.

“We kind of build a rapport with them, as weird as it may sound, it’s good to have a good rapport with them because then they are more likely to stay in compliance,” said Haynes.

To protect other families. Something Jessica Paul knows now is more important than ever.

“He’s been doing this. He’s gotten caught twice. There are probably many more victims,” said Paul.