Victim's Parents Want Action Against Online Predators

Aug. 4, 2007 — -- Danielle Helms' 14-year-old daughter Kristin was like so many other teenagers who logged onto social networking sites looking for their friends and looking to make new ones.

But now, Danielle Helms says authorities need to sound the alarm she wishes others had sounded for her.

"The Internet is a sly danger," she warns.

Child advocates have called Internet social networking sites the Sears Catalog for child predators.

Just this week, Facebook came under fire for not doing enough to protect young people. Last week, MySpace, the biggest social networking site on the internet with more than 180 million user profiles, revealed it found 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its Web site.

Kristin Helms, a star student and athlete, was seduced by a predator nearly twice her age who traveled from Texas to California to have sex with her.

And when he left, the teen was psychologically crippled.

Kristin Helms eventually revealed her secret to her mother. Danielle Helms recalls her daughter telling her that she didn't mean to fall for him emotionally and saying, "It's not your fault, mom."

And then one day, while her parents were at church, Kristin hanged herself.

"It rips your soul in half, and I will never get that day out of my mind," said Helms. "It is an agonizing thought, the way we saw our baby."

Danielle Helms and her husband called the police when they learned Kristin was being seduced by Kiley Ryan Bowers, who was 27 at the time. They took away her computer, shut down her MySpace.com profile and forbade her to contact Bowers.

But Kristin Helms secretly communicated with Bowers, calling him behind her parents' back and using school computers to contact him.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is fighting to keep predators like Bowers from ever logging onto to a social networking site again.