For lack of a better term? I’m not sure what to call it. I started arguing with someone who was claiming you shouldn’t help people in public because it could get you into legal trouble. Without wanting to even get into the ethics of why you should help someone regardless, I brought up good Samaritan laws. This person brought up a guy in Illinois who was convicted as a sex offender for grabbing a girl by the arm and lecturing her for jumping in front of a car without looking both ways first. According to this person, holding someone underage, even for a moment, counts as imprisonment of a minor, and automatically gets you put on the sex offender registry for life.

Now, that seemed fishy, but plausible in an awful sort of way, so I did some digging. I found several sources that mentioned this story, and learned the alleged man’s name is Fitzroy Barnaby, the incident occurred in 2001, he was convicted in Cook County in 2003, and it’s a cautionary tale against being a good Samaritan (ugh). But I cannot find any court documents, nor can I find any original sources. Every source references a since-deleted article by the “Chicago Sun Times”, and Barnaby isn’t even listed on the Illinois sex offender registry. Was this whole story just made up? Or have records been sealed and scrubbed or something?