A suspected pedophile joked that he hoped he wasn’t being set up by predator hunter Chris Hansen as he arranged to meet a 14-year-old girl — just to find Hansen waiting for him with police.
Tyler Devault, 33, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, was one of a “Nasty Nine” nabbed in a major sting operation across Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia that will be featured on the series “Takedown with Chris Hansen,” Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler revealed in a video statement Monday.
While speaking online with an undercover officer he thought was a young teen, Devault said he didn’t “want to see Chris Hansen from the show ‘To Catch a Predator’ there waiting for him,” the sheriff said.
Devault — who pretended to be 19 — arrived for the planned, pervy rendezvous with a “piping hot” pizza — just to find his nightmare was true, with Hansen there waiting.
He was taken into custody by the police.
Detectives had “dozens” of online conversations with potential predators, who believed they were speaking to an underage boy or girl and propositioning them for sex in Harford County, the sheriff said.
Each of the suspects was met by Hansen and Harford County deputies and was taken into custody.
One, Nicholas Fountain of Collegeville, Pennsylvania, owns two daycare centers, Gahler said.
He came into contact with an undercover deputy posing as a 14-year-old boy on a Reddit thread titled “Boys Ask Dads.”
“When I was first approached about conducting this operation, it was my sincere hope that we would come up empty-handed, that we would find there were no predators that wanted to terrorize our kids here in Harford County, and that the operation would end with zero arrests,” Gahler said.
“But sadly, that was not the case at all.”
Hansen, who rose to fame as host of the “To Catch a Predator” segment of “Dateline NBC,” launched “Takedown with Chris Hansen” on his streaming service TruBlu in 2022.
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