Courageous men tackled and restrained a registered sex offender on Sunday after a 15-year-old girl caught him peeping underneath a bathroom stall at a South Carolina Cracker Barrel, WYFF4 reported.
Officers with the Duncan Police Department arrived shortly after the incident to arrest Douglas Lane, 53, and charge him with voyeurism, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia, WSPA reported.
A group of men stopped this guy from getting away after Duncan, South Carolina police say a 15-year-old girl spotted him looking underneath the bathroom stall inside the Cracker Barrel on Sunday. Douglas Lane, of Mecklenberg County, is a registered sex-offender in North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/ASeLDKn0pe
— James Hughes (@JamesHu94283365) September 21, 2020
Lane has faced at least eight charges for voyeurism prior to this incident. He is a registered sex offender in Charlotte, North Carolina, but he was caught peeping at a Cracker Barrel in Duncan, South Carolina.
He was convicted of voyeurism in South Carolina in 1997 and of failure to register as a sex offender in 1999.
Then he was convicted of peeping on 8- and 9-year-old girls in 2004 in Mecklenburg County. He was again convicted of voyeurism in 2008 for spying on a woman.
The 15-year-old girl saw the man looking at her from underneath the adjacent stall. She left to tell her father, who then alerted a female employee about the pervert.
There were other women in the bathroom when Lane was in there, according to an anonymous first-hand witness.
“I’ll never forget the way they looked after,” the witness said. “They were traumatized.”
Duncan Police Chief Carl Long said the girl’s father stopped him outside the bathroom.
“The guy came running, sprinting out the front door with a very bloody nose,” the witness said.
Other men joined in pursuit of Lane.
A witness said he heard the men shout, “Get him, he’s getting away.”
Lane was released on bond at a hearing on Monday. He will relocate to South Carolina on house arrest until his trial, and the authorities will monitor his location by GPS.
