PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff's officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.
The Yavapai County sheriff's office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy.
One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick's grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as "Casey Price."
"This is the weirdest case I've seen in 18 years," sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. "If it wasn't so sad it would be funny."
A total of four men were in custody in the case Friday on various charges, including fraud, forgery, identity theft and failure to register as a sex offender.
Officials at the charter school in Chino Valley, about 90 miles northwest of Phoenix, told deputies that papers the "grandfather" presented appeared to be fake and that the "boy" looked much older than 12.
Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, "were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy," Quayle said.
