RALEIGH -- Police have charged a day care worker with allowing children to stay overnight in the home she shared with a convicted sex offender who was also arrested this week.
Police charged the sex offender, James Rudolf Freeman, 50, with indecent liberties with a child after police say he inappropriately touched one of the children, a 10-year-old girl, the day care worker brought to her home.
Now they have charged his wife, Sherri Denise Williams, 39, of 1913-B Peach Creek Court in Raleigh with three counts of misdemeanor child abuse, according to arrest warrants made public today.
On July 24 and July 25, Williams brought three children to her home for an overnight visit, said Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue.
Sughrue said Williams and Freeman are married and that the couple lived together at the Peach Creek Court apartment.
Investigators say Freeman, 50, worked at the Quality Education Institute on Edwin Road for a year and seven months. Williams was also employed by the same day care, just off Rock Quarry Road in Southeast Raleigh, Sughrue said.
The day care is regulated by the N.C. Division of Child Development and was last inspected on May 25. The day care has a "superior" sanitation classification and received 225 out of a possible 235 points, according to a state sanitation report.
Brad Deen, a spokesman with the division, said Thursday that the day care did not require a background check of Freeman because he was not an employee of the facility but was contracted to do maintenance work.
"In the work that he was doing he did not have interaction with the children," Deen said.
Freeman was prohibited from working at day care centers after he was convicted in Pitt County in 1996 of indecent liberties with a minor and sentenced to nearly three years in prison. He is classified as a repeat offender, according to the state’s sex offender registry.
Williams does not have a prior criminal history in Wake County, according to the City County Bureau of Identification.
In her arrest warrant, police stated that Williams brought a child into the residence and environment of a registered sex offender, "thereby allowing that sex offender the opportunity to prey on said child.”
The Wake County Sheriff’s Office charged Freeman with one felony count of sex offender on child premises after discovering that he was working at a day care center and failure to report change of address-sex offender, according to arrest warrants filed Wednesday at the Wake County Magistrate’s Office.
The indecent liberties with a minor charge was filed by Raleigh police.
Police took Williams into custody at the Wake County jail. She was released this morning after posting a $3,000 bond, a jail spokesman said this afternoon.
