Sex offender arrested after faking death to avoid registering, Arizona sheriff says
A convicted sex offender tried to fake his own death to avoid registering, an Arizona sheriff said this week.
Benjamin Hollins, 50, was arrested Tuesday, around seven months after he allegedly had a woman falsely say he jumped to his death from the Roosevelt Bridge, near the dam of the same name, in Arizona, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office said.
“Now, a lot of resources were wasted looking for his body, which was clearly not found, because he wasn’t dead,” Sheriff Mark Lamb said in a video statement released on social media.
Hollins was being held at the Pinal County jail Saturday, according to jail records. Court records did not appear to list an attorney for him, and phone calls to numbers associated with him in public records were unsuccessful because the numbers no longer worked.
Lamb said that Hollins had been convicted in California over 20 years ago and that a 2018 molestation case in Arizona required him to register yearly as a sex offender.
Online Pinal County court records show that Hollins pleaded guilty in a plea agreement to a 2018 kidnapping-related charge and that a sexual abuse count was dismissed.
After the false report of his death, Hollins’ sex offender status lapsed, and police later found him living under an assumed name in Mesa in Maricopa County, which is adjacent to Pinal County to the north, Lamb said.
He was then arrested by a Pinal County task force, the sheriff’s office said.
Court records show two other past guilty dispositions for Hollis in Pinal County related to his sex offender status — one on 2019 for failing to register and one in 2022 related to a name or address change.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
