(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) A south Florida mother is accused of trying to arrange a hit on her 3-year-old son through a fake website that purports to facilitate contract killings.
The mom, 18-year-old Jazmin Paez, “allegedly sent pictures of the boy and the exact location of where the child was going to be,” WTVJ reported.
Robert Innes, the owner of the parody site RentAHitman.com, said he had to be persistent to get law enforcement authorities to take the threat seriously.
On Tuesday, however, Miami-Dade County cops arrested Paez on charges of first-degree murder solicitation and unlawful use of a communications device, WPLG reported.
In the course of the investigation, an undercover cop pretending to be a hitman made contact with Paez, who allegedly was willing to pay $3,000 to get it done, the New York Post reported.
The police report indicated that the suspect’s “specific request was for her son to ‘be taken away, far, far, far away and possibly be killed but ASAP.’”
Detectives then used her IP address and the provided phone number to track her down, as well as verifying the boy’s posted photo with his grandmother.
The state Department of Children and Families was notified of the situation.
The child is safe and in the care of the grandma. The court is requiring Paez to stay away from her son when she bonds out of jail.
Although the Rent-A-Hitman website contains obvious indicia of satire, the Miami incident wasn’t the first time it has resulted in criminal intervention. A Michigan woman was convicted last year of attempting to murder her ex-husband via the site.
The webmaster notifies law enforcement if any of the hit-man-for-hire requests appear legitimate.
Innes said this particular request seemed more real than the hundreds of presumably non-serious solicitations that the bogus website receives.
“The ability to research names and addresses and verify that the intended target lived in at a particular address—that to me is a red flag,” he told NBC News. “If that information is corroborated, then obviously there’s something more that needs to be looked at, and that’s why I referred it.”
However, Innes added that after he tipped the off police to the alleged danger, cops at first passed him along to the CrimeStoppers network, which rebuffed him.
“They were not interested,” he said. “They sent me an email saying if I contacted one more time they were going to send a cease-and-desist letter.”
Fortunately, the website owner didn’t give up.
Innes expressed relief that “his report was eventually taken seriously and [he] appreciated what police did.”
