Florida Holds Child-Murder Suspect
Cops: Convicted Sex Offender Confesses He Strangled 13-Year-Old
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Play CBS Video Video Holes In Sex-Offense System When a child becomes victim to a brutal crime, chances are the predator is a registered sex offender. Jim Acosta asks what's wrong with the system that saw two girls killed in the past month.
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Video Sex Offender's Murder Plea In Florida, convicted sex offender David Onstott allegedly has confessed to the murder of 13-year-old Sarah Lunde. CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta reports.
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Video Sheriff On Sex Offender Sheriff David Gee of Hillsborough, Fla., gives The Early Show more details on the case involving the convicted sex offender who allegedly confessed to murdering 13-year-old Sarah Lunde.
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Sarah Michelle Lunde (AP)
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David Onstott, shown in a booking photo (AP)
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Deputies searching the pond (AP)
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Photo Essay Sarah Lunde Images of the search for a missing Florida girl and its end in tragedy and an arrest.
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Interactive Out Of Sight: Missing Kids Get the facts on kidnappings, learn predator profiles and check out resources for locating missing children.
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Interactive Children In Danger Warning signs, state-by-state child services information and a history of child welfare reforms.
Sarah's relatives and members of her First Apostolic Church congregation turned out in droves Sunday to tearfully mourn the loss of the girl. Her young friends dropped to their knees and wept.
"It's been terrible," sobbed Leslie Fontana, Sarah's best friend.
Sarah's mother was too shaken to talk Sunday, but her brother Larry May said: "It's devastating, it's just unbelievable."
"Everybody has things they wished they'd done — spending more time with their children or keeping in closer contact," May said.
Among the mourners were Mark Lunsford, Jessica's father, and Roy Brown, whose daughter Amanda was murdered in 1997 by a convicted child molester in Tampa.
Both men had lent their support to the Lunde family this past week and Lunsford had helped search for Sarah, saying some of her family had helped search for his daughter in February.
"It's sad that it takes something like this to bring a community together," Lunsford said. "America needs to wake up. The next child could be yours."
But there's no easy solution to the abundance of state-registered sex offenders. Moreover, state legislation would be required before offenders could be monitored more closely.
"There's way too many sex offenders to realistically expect us to monitor them all carefully and closely," Tewksberry told Acosta.
Church members said that on any other Sunday, Sarah would have spent the afternoon walking with other church members to nearby homes to hand out Bibles.
The church had become her refuge from troubles in her life, including times when she had run away from home.
"People asked me why did she come here, why did she spend her time here," said Matt Fontana, the youth minister at the church. "Because she found love here ... Now she's in heaven."
The small church normally draws only about 50 congregants for morning services, but its pews were filled with more than double that Sunday.
Sarah had started coming to the church three years ago on her own and no other members of her family attended with her, church leaders said. She often would call two or three families to arrange for a ride and they'd all show up to get her.
"Every Sunday we talked about who was going to pick up Sarah," Sherry Cook said. "I can't believe we're not picking her up this morning."
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