Melissa Gregory

mgregory@thetowntalk.com, (318) 792-1807

Even before Jessica Christy Watkins' 6-year-old son asked why a man was watching them through binoculars, the Woodworth mom had a feeling that something wasn't quite right.

Watkins had brought her sons, ages 6 and 2, to the new splash pad at Kees Park in Pineville on Tuesday because the boys had been begging to go. It's not the kind of trip she usually makes by herself, but she relented on Tuesday.

The family was finishing their pizza at a picnic table at the crowded park on La. Highway 28 East. Watkins began putting sunblock on the boys when her oldest asked her about the man with binoculars. She followed her son's gaze and saw a man later identified as Talbert Frank Ortego, 57, sitting on a bicycle behind a fence and concrete barrier. He was watching through binoculars and was fondling himself, she told The Town Talk.

"I jumped in front of my kids,” said Watkins, who also said she yelled that she was calling police. It was about 1:30 p.m.

But she said Ortego showed no reaction to her threat. Even as she called police, she said he rode his bicycle along the fence and kept looking through the binoculars at those at the busy splash pad, which just opened on Friday.

That unnerved Watkins, and she hasn't been able to forget it.

"It’s like he doesn’t care," she said.

Related story:Trooper: Combat trafficking by staying involved in kids' lives

Related story: The 'dark underworld business' of sex trafficking in Louisiana

Ortego also had gotten the attention of others at the park, said Watkins. She stayed to talk to police, as did other people. Officers with the Pineville Police Department were there fast, she said, but Ortego already had peddled away.

Officers told the crowd that he had been captured a block away, so Watkins gathered up her children and went home. She said she's heard of such incidents through the media, but this experience made the danger real to her.

It also hammered home a lesson she'd been trying to teach her older son earlier that day, about how he must remain close to her and keep her within sight.

"It’s just sad that we can’t go anywhere with our kids,” she said.

Ortego, of the 500 block of Byron Street, was arrested by the department and was booked into the Rapides Parish Detention Center on charges of unlawful presence of a violent sexual predator and failure to register as a sex offender.

Ortego pleaded guilty in March 1994 to one count of attempted aggravated rape, making him a Tier 3 sex offender, according to Rapides Parish Clerk of Court and Louisiana State Police records. He was sentenced to serve 10 years at hard labor.

After his release from prison, Ortego had several other run-ins with the law because of his failure to register, according to records.

In 2012, he was arrested on a charge of failure to register as a sex offender, which is a felony. But the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor count of having no driver's license in his possession after he pleaded guilty, according to clerk of court records. He was sentenced to serve five days in parish prison with credit for time served.

In 2014, he pleaded no contest in Rapides Parish to failure to register as a sex offender after two arrests — one in April 2012 and one in July 2013 — on that same charge. He was sentenced to serve two years at hard labor.

Learning about Ortego's past history floored Watkins, she said. "I think he needs to be in jail where he belongs, and he needs to stay there,” she said.

"I hope he gets what he deserves.”

Watkins said she just did what she thought needed to be done on Tuesday, and that she won't let the incident keep her from the Pineville splash pad. But she did say that any future trips would be with her husband or another adult accompanying her and the kids.

After Tuesday's arrest, Ortego remains in jail with no bond set on the failure to register charge, according to the department's release on the incident. Bond on the unlawful presence of a violent sexual predator charge was set at $5,000, according to detention center records.