Feds called lax in monitoring Garrido on parole JAYCEE DUGARD CASE

An Alameda County Sheriff Deputy walks up the driveway to the boarded up home of Phillip and Nancy Garrido's outside of Antioch Wednesday Sept 16, 2009. Investigators are back at the Northern California home of a couple already charged with one child abduction seeking any evidence that might link them to two other cases in the 1980s. less An Alameda County Sheriff Deputy walks up the driveway to the boarded up home of Phillip and Nancy Garrido's outside of Antioch Wednesday Sept 16, 2009. Investigators are back at the Northern California home of ... more Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Feds called lax in monitoring Garrido on parole 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

In more than a decade of supervising paroled rapist Phillip Garrido, the U.S. probation office in San Francisco seldom visited his home, ignored positive drug tests and warnings that he was a "time bomb," and largely left monitoring to his therapist, federal court officials said in a report released Friday.

Although a search of Garrido's Antioch home might not have detected kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard, Garrido's "horrendous acts" might have been prevented "had his federal supervision been conducted properly from the onset," said the report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

The report also said the San Francisco probation office "had a track record of inadequate supervision" of its cases. The office dismissed its chief in 2007 and overhauled its practices, and has made substantial improvements, the report said.

Garrido was sentenced last month to 431 years in prison for kidnapping Dugard, then 11, in South Lake Tahoe in June 1991 and holding her captive in his backyard for 18 years and sexually abusing her. His wife, Nancy, was sentenced to 36 years to life.

The couple's 2009 arrest prompted widespread condemnation of state parole agents, who had supervised Garrido since June 1999. California legislators approved a $20 million settlement last year for Dugard and her two daughters, both fathered by Garrido.

Lax federal monitoring

Friday's report described equally lax monitoring by U.S. probation officers between December 1988, after Garrido completed federal and Nevada state prison sentences for rape, and March 1999.

During that period, the report said, Garrido should have been classified as a "high risk," under probation office policy, but officers visited him at home only 10 or 11 times, and not at all during 1990, 1992 and 1994. He reported periodically to the probation office, sometimes as often as once a month.

Months before his release from prison in 1988, Garrido's probationofficer and a treatment center counselor in Oakland described him as a "time bomb" who needed close monitoring, the report said.

He never got that monitoring, the report said. It said his probation officers apparently "abdicated control of the parolee's supervision to the therapist" and had little contact with local police or with Garrido's neighbors.

Testing positive

Garrido, who had a record of drug convictions, tested positive for illegal drugs four times while on federal probation, the report said. It said probation officers did not tighten their supervision.

In periodic reports to officials in Nevada, where Garrido was on lifetime parole, federal officers did not mention the drug tests and instead asserted that "he has been cooperating with our office with no major problems," the report said.

On one occasion in 1993, a probation officer reported to the U.S. Parole Commission that Garrido had missed appointments and failed to show up for drug testing. The commission ordered him arrested and placed him on electronic monitoring at home for four months, a period that included more drug use, the report said.

There were also indications of sexual harassment, the report said: Three women at a nursing home where Garrido was working in 1989 said they felt nervous around him and that he was asking women for dates, and another woman quit her job in 1990 after reporting unwanted attention from Garrido.

Door-to-door salesman

Garrido then told the probation office he was getting a new job selling water purifiers door-to-door. The report said there was no evidence that the office notified Garrido's employer about his record or took any steps to reduce the risk to local residents.

The probation office told Garrido in 1989 that he was required to register with the state as a sex offender but never verified that he had done so, the report said. It said he registered in 1999 after federal supervision ended.

By the late 1990s, the report said, Garrido was getting glowing reports from his psychiatrist and his probation officers. The Parole Commission gave him an early discharge from federal monitoring in March 1999 and praised him for "having responded positively to supervision."