Many sex offenders in our area are in violation of state registration laws

When Celena Spain-Frank was a pastor in upstate New York in 2016, she admitted to having sex with a minor in the church parking lot where she worked.

She identified as a man then, going by a different first name.

Spain pled guilty to sexual misconduct down from a third-degree rape charge.

As part of her sentence, she was required to register as a sex offender for two decades.

But, after moving to New Jersey in 2018, she stopped registering.

Officials in Cumberland County issued a warrant for her arrest in 2019.

Sometime after that, Spain transitioned to identifying as a woman and going by the name Celena.

She moved to Pennsylvania and started volunteering at two area churches while never disclosing her past.

Since she didn't register as a sex offender in Pennsylvania, as she was supposed to, no one at the churches would have known of her sex offender status.

“It's alarming to the community that she was out there in plain view,” said Robert Clark, supervisory deputy of the Eastern District Pennsylvania Office of the U.S. Marshals. 

Cumberland County referred Spain's case to the U.S. Marshals last year after a detective there found evidence of her living in Philadelphia.

The Marshals found Spain and arrested her last summer at her Philadelphia home. She was charged with failure to register, which is a federal felony offense.

“I think she was able to avoid authorities because she had crossed state lines and no one had brought it to the more serious attention,” Clark said.

Spain is not the only person who went missing for years from the required sex offender registries.

As of Feb. 1, more than 1,000 sex offenders in our tri-state region were in violation of state registry laws.

Of those, at least 320 had active warrants for their arrest for failure to register as a sex offender. They are known as absconding sex offenders.

“It is an emerging area that we're starting to prosecute and that we're seeing more and more violations of,” said Michelle Rotella, Assistant U.S. Attorney with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She oversees the district’s child sexual exploitation cases. 

Rotella says part of the issue is that each state has its own sex offender registry with its own rules.

“There's not always sharing among different states in terms of registration information,” she said. 

The NBC10 Investigators found one example of a man who has been listed as an absconder in Pennsylvania since 2021, but is registered and in compliance in Florida.

We called the Florida sex offender registry and an official there told us that a sheriff's deputy had just done a site visit a few weeks prior and confirmed the man was living there and did not have a warrant for his arrest.

When we checked with the Pennsylvania State Police, they said otherwise.

“Just because they absconded up here and properly registered elsewhere, they would still be considered absconded,” said Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Lt. Adam Reed.

But, when we checked with police in Philadelphia and the District Attorney's Office they said no such warrant exists for the man.

“There's no one blanket registration that covers the United States, so it does present difficulties,” Rotella said. 

So, when sex offenders go missing from registries, Rotella says it takes good old-fashioned police work.

“A lot of times they're moving to another jurisdiction. There are people who have changed their names. Maybe they're not working,” she said. “It takes investigation to be able to locate somebody.”

Clark says as the number of absconder cases keeps rising, it's getting harder for law enforcement to keep up.

“There's hundreds of non-compliant sex offenders and there's not as many investigators to go after them,” he said. 

Absconding sex offender cases only go to the U.S. Marshals if there is some belief or evidence that a sex offender has crossed state lines. Otherwise, the local jurisdictions would investigate the cases and try to find the person.

Since Spain was arrested and charged with failing to register, she now appears on Pennsylvania's Megan's Law list.

Failing to register usually carries mandatory prison time, but Spain received four years probation for her violation.

Rotella said investigators didn't find any evidence of other criminal activity or any child sexual exploitation in Spain's case, hence the lack of prison time.

Spain declined to speak with us.

During her sentencing, she apologized to the judge and said, "I made a mistake. It doesn't define who I am."

She said she will continue to be “a better person for myself and my children.”