DENVER - Police are looking for a violent, habitual sex offender who absconded from a community corrections facility in Denver.

Roger Hudson, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, tells The Denver Post (http://bit.ly/1jZIhkS ) a warrant was requested for Eric E. Hartwell on Friday evening, 22 minutes after Hartwell's ankle monitor was apparently removed. Hartwell had been staying at a facility called Independence House.

Hartwell was convicted of raping a child in 1991 and attempted indecent liberties in 1996, according to the Colorado sex offender registry.

"This is an active investigation of an absconder that we are hoping not to send even farther underground," Hudson said.

The corrections department's fugitive apprehension unit is working with other law enforcement agencies to find Hartwell "as quickly as possible," he said.

Hartwell was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to serve a lifetime of supervised parole by a federal judge in Texas in March 2010 after he was found guilty of failing to register as a sex offender, according to a U.S. Justice Department news release.

Hartwell was placed in a halfway house in Washington state in March 2009 for failure to register as a sex offender, but after just a week there he cut off his leg monitor and fled to Texas, according to the Justice Department.