Serial sex offender back in jail after 32nd arrest, but will he stay there?

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 News) – A serial sex offender is back behind bars but will he stay there this time or be let back out on the streets?

24-year-old Mauricio Adrian Navinick is a familiar face at the Salt Lake County Jail. He’s been arrested 32 times in the last 7 years including a dozen times this year alone.

The mug shots and the charges have stacked up: intoxication, disorderly conduct, theft, public lewdness and lewdness involving a child exposing himself and committing a lewd act in front of a 14-year-old girl on a Frontrunner train in March of 2018 but those are all misdemeanor offenses and each time judges let him out of jail.

Following an arrest for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia on June 24th, 2019 Judge William Kendall issued a court order reading:

“The court finds that Mauricio Adrian Navinick would constitute a substantial danger to other persons or to the community…Therefore, the court orders that Mauricio Adrian Navinick is to be held without bail.”

Still, he got out anyway and 5 days later was arrested for exposing himself onboard a TRAX train. Salt Lake County Attorney Sim Gill explained that prosecutors’ hands are often tied.

“They have jail overcrowding so they’re going to look to see if that person has a misdemeanor offense,” Gill told ABC4 News. “And generally it is usually a violent offense that will hold a person and even then sometimes we struggle to keep people held.”

Last Thursday Navinick allegedly broke into a woman’s apartment and asking her to perform a sex act. After she locked herself in a bathroom to call the police, he reportedly committed a lewd act on her couch and was nude when officers arrived to arrest him.

Gill calls the escalation in Navinick’s behavior “concerning” and says there aren’t enough jail beds or intervention programs available for repeat misdemeanor offenders or “frequent flyers” as he calls them.

“The frustration is that law enforcement are seeing them on a repeated basis,” Gill said. “We as prosecutors really can’t hold them because there’s no room at the jail to hold them and the most important part is that there aren’t enough of these programs even though when we can prosecute them there isn’t sufficient oversight to get them into treatment so you can actually start to alter their behavior.”

For now, Mr. Navinick remains locked up at the Salt Lake County Jail on $10,000 bail while the County Attorney’s Office screens the new charges against him.