UPDATE, JAN. 28, 7:08 P.M.: A sex-offender parolee and John Belushi look-alike was sentenced today to five years
in state prison for molesting a 14-year-old girl on an Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) bus in front
of her friends.
Get this: At the time of the offense, the genius was wearing a GPS tracking device. The device and 50-year-old James Edward Norkin's parole officer easily linked him to the crime.
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So Norkin really had no choice but to plead guilty to three felony
counts of lewd acts on a child with sentencing allegations and
enhancements for being convicted and sent to prison, to not remain free
for a period of five years on each of the three separate convictions,
and for being a stranger to his teen victim.
ORIGINAL POST, JUNE 10, 2010, 3:57 P.M.: Believe it or not, that is not John Belushi in the photo released by the Orange County Sheriff's Department in connection with a case involving a man who allegedly touched a teenage girl in a sexual manner aboard a bus in South County.
We stand unconvinced. Not only would one imagine Belushi wearing a golf cap like that were he still alive, but also dude looks like he's about to shout, “FOOD FIGHT!”
No, no, swears the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD), that is James Edward Norkin, who has been convicted of sex crimes and was required to register as a sex offender.
He'd been picked up for violating his parole Wednesday and was already back snug as a bug in a rug in his cell at Chino State Prison when the OCSD simultaneously released the photo at left and video from an Orange County Transportation Authority bus.
At 3 p.m. Sunday, three girls described as being age 15 and younger boarded the Laguna Hills-bound bus from 375 Broadway in Laguna Beach and took a seat in the back row. The man shown in the video–wearing beige slacks, a white button-up shirt and a golf cap-boarded the bus and sat down next to the girls.
He touched one girl in a sexual way, but she was too scared to let out a peep. One of her friends saw what was going on and told the man to stop. He never said a word to the girls, and then got off the bus at the Laguna Hills Mall stop and walked toward the shopping center.
After the OCSD released the video and photo and they were splashed across television screens, a flood of tips came into the department. But the winner came from Norkin's parole officer, who caught the video on the news.
Norkin, who'd been busted multiple times for indecent exposure and failure to register as a
sex offender, now faces new charges of child molestation.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.