FRESNO, CA (KFSN/CNN) – After finding a strange cell phone in his then-14-year-old daughter’s possession, a California father arranged to meet the man who allegedly gave it to her and arrested him.
Hugo Rabson, 42, pleaded not guilty last week to a felony charge of arranging a meeting with a minor for lewd or lascivious behavior. He’s free on a $30,000 bond.
Father Todd Thomas made a citizen’s arrest of the 42-year-old after he found his 14-year-old daughter sleeping with a contraband cell phone in March 2017.
"She was laying there with her head on her arm and a cell phone in her hand, and I don't let her have a cell phone," Thomas said.
Thomas and his wife did some digging to figure out how the teenager got the phone and how she used it. Their daughter told them she met Rabson on an app called Whisper she could access without her own phone.
Rabson eventually gave the 14-year-old a phone inside a hollowed-out book she kept to hide it at home. He allegedly used that phone to send her sexually-explicit messages.
"I was shocked at what I found," Thomas said. "The messages this man had sent to my daughter are worse than anything I'd say to a one-night stand."
An arrest warrant revealed the content of some of those messages, including "Daddy needs to see his little girl... naked." Rabson also allegedly used the nickname he wanted to be called “Daddy Sugar.”
The father says his first instinct was to beat the man with a baseball bat.
"I wanted him gone, off the face of the earth," he said. "I couldn't believe he'd done this to my baby."
But Thomas says he knew violence wouldn’t help anyone, so he hatched a new plan. Posing as his daughter, he texted the man on the other end of the line and asked him to meet at the same place where he gave the 14-year-old the phone.
The angry father brought a friend to help him make a citizen’s arrest, and they recorded some of the video with Rabson. They recently posted the video to Facebook, where it has been shared thousands of times.
"The whole world will see you," said Thomas’ friend in the video of the arrest. "The whole world will see you."
Police later arrested Rabson. In the search warrant, they revealed the man reset his phone, deleting all evidence from it. They still had evidence on the 14-year-old’s phone.
Thomas says he wants to use his pain to help other fathers in similar situations. He’s looking for counselors and anyone else who can help him create a support group he calls “Fathership.”
Copyright 2018 KFSN, Todd Thomas, Fresno County Sheriff’s Office via CNN. All rights reserved.
