VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — A 41-year-old Chesapeake man who is a convicted sex offender is back behind bars, and this time, police had help from a nationwide group aimed at catching suspected child predators.
A spokesperson with Virginia Beach Police told 10 On Your Side they took Joseph Wills, 41, into custody around 5 p.m. Tuesday near the 2700 block of Reef Court after getting a report of alleged sexual abuse.
Online court records state Wills is facing two criminal sexual assault charges in connection to Tuesday nights incident, including attempted carnal knowledge of child between 13 and 15-years-old without force, and the other is proposing sex act by a communication system with a victim younger than 15 and at least seven years older than the child.
Police say the investigation is ongoing.
Wills has a bond hearing at 8 a.m. Friday in Virginia Beach General District Court, and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing at 8:30 a.m. Oct. 31, also in Virginia Beach General District Court.
EDP Watch is a group that makes it their mission to catch suspected child predators, and they brought that mission to Hampton Roads Tuesday night.
The group captured video of the moment Virginia Beach Police officers chased after a man, tackled him to the ground and arrested him.
“As soon as he saw the cops, I mean, he just started taking off,” said EDP Watch CEO Jidion Adams. “And I guess Virginia Beach PD, they don’t play about that physical fitness, because they caught him very fast.”
Adams said the man in the video is Wills. One of the organization’s “decoys” had been allegedly talking to Wills since June 28, posing as a 14-year-old girl.
“He wanted to get that rapport first,” Adams said, “and then, after he felt like he had the good rapport with her, he, instead of on text, he would want to get on call to kind of say the twisted and demonic things that he wanted to do to her.”
Adams said that Wills agreed to meet with the decoy, and that’s when EDP Watch showed up, instead, and spoke with him for about an hour.
“He was talking with us,” Adams said. “He admitted to everything, like wanting to have sex — admitted … that was him saying all that stuff in the chat logs.”
According to the Virginia State Police data base, Wills is already listed as a convicted sex offender prior to this encounter.
“He had exposed himself to two minors back in 2004 and then in 2017 he had two phones full of child pornography that his parole officers confiscated from him,” Adams said.
The organization eventually called the police on Wills during the encounter.
“We try to make it to where the internet is actually a safe place for kids and anybody that takes advantage of that, we hope that they contact one of our decoys so that they can feast, you know, repercussions of the law,” Adams said.
This isn’t the first time Adams made his way to the Hampton Roads region to help catch a suspected predator.
He also had one of his decoys pose a 12-year-old girl back in March to help Accomack County Deputies arrest a 20-year-old man.
Adams explained one of the most important messages to takeaway from the incidents goes to parents.
“There is no such thing as an invasion of privacy when it comes to protecting your child from these monsters online, like apps like Instagram, TikTok, Roblox, everything,” Adams said. “We’ve caught people from all these different apps trying to meet children, and you kind of have to be one step ahead.”
