A group of fathers at a South Carolina Cracker Barrel tackled and detained a convicted sex offender in the parking lot on Sunday after a 15 year old girl accused the man of looking under bathroom stalls in the ladies’ room.
Douglas Lane, 53, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was arrested and charged with voyeurism, possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
According to the local TV station, Lane is a registered sex offender in North Carolina, and has at least eight prior charges for peeping.
Lane was registered as a sex offender in 2008, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations. He was convicted of peeping in 2004 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The victims were 8 and 9 years old. Lane was also convicted of peeping in Mecklenburg County in 2008, the victim was 18 years or older according to county records.
The South Carolina sex offender registry also states that Lane was convicted of peeping, voyeurism or aggravated voyeurism in South Carolina in 1997, and failure to register in 1999.
The Incident
A witness to the incident told the local news outlet, WYFF News 4, that he and his son were inside the restaurant when they heard a commotion that sounded like a fight. He heard people say, “Get him, he’s getting away.”
The man and his son were close to the door when they saw Lane, who already had a very bloody nose, run outside. Someone then tackled Lane on the other side of the parking lot.
He and his son witnessed people hitting the man. He then handed his son off to his wife, ran outside, and took video of the incident.
The man said that his son asked him a lot of questions about what was happening, and he told him that “there was a bad guy and a lot of good guys took down the bad guy.”
The video taken by the witness shows Lane on the ground outside the restaurant with a bloody face and t-shirt, surrounded by the group of fathers who took him down.
A group of men stopped this guy from getting away after Duncan, South Carolina police say a 15-year-old girl spotted him looking underneath the bathroom stall inside the Cracker Barrel on Sunday. Douglas Lane, of Mecklenberg County, is a registered sex-offender in North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/ASeLDKn0pe
— James Hughes (@JamesHu94283365) September 21, 2020
The victim of this incident, a 15 year old girl, told authorities that when she sat down in the bathroom, a man had his head under the stall looking at her. According to witnesses, the 15 year old was not the only girl in the bathroom at the time of the incident.
“I’ll never forget the way they looked after. They were traumatized,” one witness told the TV station.
In a statement to the TV station, Duncan Police Chief Carl Long said that the fathers involved in detaining Lane were in town for a girls’ softball tournament, and held him until responding officers arrived on the scene.
Good parents! They were right in getting this sorry excuse of a man. If everyone did this there would be less crime committed to people, regardless the crime. They need to castrate these perverted people. 🥵
It is too bad he fell off the curb before the police arrived. Marine Bob