A 60-year-old South Dakota man took his own life after being confronted by a self-proclaimed pedophile hunter.
Predator Poachers founder Alex Rosen said that during an interaction outside of the man’s Canova, South Dakota, home, Donald Letcher, 60, told him in very graphic detail about his taste in pornography that featured infants, according to the New York Post.
Rosen then called the police and said Letcher told the police officer who responded the same things he had told Rosen.
Letcher then went back inside his home as the police officer called a superior for instructions.
Soon after that, Rosen said, a popping noise was heard.
‘It didn’t really register what it was because it wasn’t a loud shot, it was a .22, I think he had, and then the cop breaks the door down,” Rosen said, according to the Daily Mail.
“The cameraman goes around the side of the building and sees him with a hole in his head bleeding out … [H]e was airlifted to hospital where he was pronounced dead,” Rosen said.
Rosen said he and those with him were briefly detained by police after the incident.
Rosen shrugged off any responsibility for Letcher’s death.
“There is really no good reason to attack us for approaching an individual like this. We never go up to anyone where we don’t have great reason to believe they are hurting children,” he said.
“It couldn’t have happened to a worse guy. I know it’s still a human life and all that, but when we say death penalty for pedos, we mean it,” he said.
Rosen’s Predator Poachers website describes the organization as “a group of independent journalists and private citizens who travel the country conducting intervention-style sting operations to catch child predators.
“Our mission is to take pedophiles offline, off the streets, and away from kids, one predator at a time.”
Rosen said that his team had made contact with Letcher while posing as a preteen girl, according to the Post.
“This guy messaged us first in April, and all the messages he was pretty sexual, asking us for nudes thinking we were a 12-year-old girl,” Rosen said.
Rosen exulted about the incident in a post on social media platform X.
“A pedophiIe k*lled himself tonight during a live catch as police were making contact with him,” he posted.
“Before they showed up, he admitted to viewing child p*** as low as infants, which he described in disturbing detail. The cop made a phone call, at which time he ran back into his house, locked the door, and offed himself,” he said.
The Mail said that in 1995, Letcher was convicted of two counts of molesting a 9-year-old girl, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality.
