LCSO provides information to USA TODAY that it declined to share with our Lassen County readers

I got a call Tuesday afternoon from a USA TODAY reporter from San Diego who’s been following my stories regarding the missing person who’s finally been located thanks to the great work by our Lassen County Sheriff’s Office. He told me he was coming to Lassen County to work on the story Wednesday, and I shared what information I could with him.

The reporter said based on everything he’d seen on social media, he believed the missing person was Thomas Manizak who went missing in 1999. I agreed, but I also told him the Lassen County Sheriff’s office had declined to reveal the identity of the nonverbal person located in a Los Angeles hospital in their initial statement at the request of the man’s sister, and that I was uncomfortable identifying someone as a sex offender without some official verification of that fact. He said his editors had expressed a similar concern, although the allegation was all over social media.

I also told him I had called Lassen County Sheriff John McGarva a couple of days later and shared with the sheriff the uproar brewing in the community that the sister of the found man had started a gofundme account that was collecting thousands of dollars for her missing brother who was a registered sex offender. That fact was not revealed to those making contributions to the gofundme account. What about the victim, one reader asked. Would people be donating money to this cause if they knew the missing man was a sex offender asked another reader. McGarva stuck to his guns and told me he had agreed not to release the missing man’s identity and he intended to honor that agreement.

Click here to see our original story on Nov. 25.

Click here to see our story on this becoming a national story on Nov. 28. Actually, it became an international story after being picked up by The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom.

Click  here to see our story about McGarva’s refusal to share that information despite the public uproar on Nov. 29.

I called to check in with the USA TODAY reporter after Wednesday’s Susanville City Council meeting, and he referred me to a story USA TODAY had posted a couple of hours earlier — entitled “Darker side to missing man story: He’s a convicted sex offender.”

And as I read the story, I discovered this — “But new details uncovered by USA TODAY reveal that Manizak is a registered sex offender, convicted of abusing a child in 1993, a captain with the Lassen County Sheriff’s Department confirmed Wednesday.”

Some things just make ya wanna spit.