Deer Park dad jailed for stalking-related offences
A Deer Park father of three who preyed on and sent vile messages to teenage girls after using Facebook to track down their mobile numbers has been jailed for one year.
Police & Courts
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A seedy serial stalker who preyed on teenage girls on Facebook had up to 900 names and photos of would-be targets on his computer.
Richard Awad, 37, was on Monday jailed in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court for a year after pleading guilty to 42 stalking-related offences involving 35 victims aged 14 to their mid-20s. Twenty-four of the victims were children.
The Deer Park father of three would find their phone numbers on Facebook and bombard them with texts and voicemails calling them “butter legs”, “skanky pants” and “dirty little tart” and detailing what he wanted to do to them.
“Let me f. k you tonight,” the married man told one of his victims. “Maybe you can just sit on my face for a while.”
He told another he wanted to smell her panties and “f. k the brains out of her”.
Despite randomly plucking profiles from the internet, he implied he knew them, saying he had not heard from them in a while and wanted to catch up.
His offences spanned the year to September 2019.
He told police it was just a prank, but magistrate Angela Bolger said his conduct was “utterly abhorrent”.
“It is a shocking thing to target young girls in this way,” Ms Bolger said. “It’s calculated. It’s predatory.”
She jailed him for a year, and ordered he undergo a 12-month Community Correction Order on his release, involving 100 hours of community work, sex offending programs and drug and mental health treatment. She also placed him on the Sex Offender Register for eight years.
Lawyer Jarrod Van Arkadie, for Awad, said his client, having children of his own, now had insight and remorse and knew his actions would have been “scary” for his victims.
“If it was his daughter, he would have been quite angry about what occurred,” Mr Van Arkadie told the court.
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