PLEASANT VALLEY Mo. — What would you do if you discovered your house was wrongly listed on a statewide registry as the home of a sex offender? That’s exactly what happened to a Missouri woman who has been fighting for months to get the mistake corrected.
It’s a modest four-plex off of 69 Highway in the Kansas City suburb of Pleasant Valley. Rhonda McGinnis is the owner and has lived and worked there for 35 years, so you can imagine McGinnis’ surprise when she discovered her home address is on Missouri’s sex offender registry.
“That upsets me,” she said.
Her address is listed as a the address of Michael McNish, a man convicted of among other things, statutory rape for having sex with a 9-year-old. So how did someone like McNish, who has spent most of his life in and out of jail, have McGinnis’ address?
“His mother lived here,” she explained.
That was ten years ago, but McNish keeps using his mom’s former address for his driver’s license, his attorney, his probation officer and the sex offender registry.
Every time McGinnis checks her mail, a lot of it is for McNish.
“That’s not all of it. I’ve sent a bunch of it back,” she pointed out.
She’s told the post office that McNish doesn’t live there, but the mail keeps coming from the state and the county, even the highway patrol, all looking for him.
“Everybody seems to have this address. I want to know where he’s at and what he’s doing. They evidently have no clue or no idea,” McGinnis said.
McGinnis called the Clay County Sheriff’s Office who runs the sex offender registry, telling them McNish is lying about his address and she wants it removed. Officers even made a visit to her home.
“They knocked on all the doors of the tenants and asked them. It didn’t make no difference.”
Six months later her address is still in the registry. That’s why she called FOX 4 Problem Solvers. We called the sheriff’s department again, where someone said the office was aware of the problem, but had to wait until the prosecutor filed charges against McNish for not registering as a sexual offender before it could remove the address from the registry. That took six months, but now the address has been removed from the registry..
McNish is listed as an absconder from justice, address unknown, and there are two warrants for his arrest. McGinnis hopes to never see him again. She’ll be happy to forward the mail she has to his next home, which may end up being a county jail.
FOX 4 Problem Solvers also contacted the post office, which agreed to stop delivering McNish’s mail to an address where he has never lived. By the way, the Clay County Sheriff’s Department is looking for Michael McNish. If you know where he is please call the TIPS Hotline at (816) 474-8477.
