Attorneys dispute man’s contact with children

An Evergreen sex offender had his sentence for sexual assault revoked a third time on Thursday after a judge found that he consumed methamphetamine and got kicked out of a mandatory sex offender treatment program.

Flathead District Court Judge Amy Eddy said Walter Carl Higginson, 30, will have to prove that he can re-enroll in sex offender treatment in the community if he wants to be released from custody again.

“That is a condition of your suspended sentence and it is not one I will lift based on your history,” Eddy said.

She also said that Higginson will have to prove that he will live at a residence where children will never be present.

Probation Officer Brock O’Hara testified that he believed that Higginson had broken terms of parole by living in a home where three children were present at the time of an arrest in February 2015. Higginson was taken into custody after he admitted using methamphetamine. He later tested positive for the drug.

Higginson is not allowed to have unsupervised contact with minors. He is a registered sex offender serving the suspended portion of a sentence for a rape conviction from 2003.

He also was convicted of felony failure to register as a sex offender in 2004.

His sentence was previously revoked for living in a home with children, O’Hara said. When he was released from prison, officers again had to warn him that he was not allowed to live near children.

“He was living on Dogwood Street in Evergreen and we asked him to move because it was too close to a day care,” O’Hara said. “He had been revoked before for this exact same thing.”

Public defender Vicki Frazier argued that the three children at the home the day of Higginson’s arrest did not have direct contact with him.

“He was not alone with the children,” Frazier said. “He was not ever near the children.”

Higginson’s roommate Cheryl Benton testified that she had been watching the three children, who were all under 7 years old, the day of Higginson’s arrest.

“He was in the back bedroom playing Xbox,” Benton said.

The children were never near Higginson, Benton said. Benton did not tell the children’s parents that a sex offender was in the home.

Eddy found that prosecutors did not sufficiently prove that Higginson was left unsupervised with children, however, she did find that Higginson had used methamphetamine, which got him kicked out of sex offender treatment. Those violations were enough to trigger a third revocation.

Eddy stressed that a sentencing determination in the future will likely hinge on whether or not Higginson can get back into the treatment program.

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.