UNITED STATES
BuzzFeed
Nicolás Medina Mora
BuzzFeed News Reporter
The blind seminarian got off the plane shortly after noon on Friday and made his way through the San Diego International Airport. When he got to baggage claim, he took out his cell phone and dialed the number of a woman he’d met on Craigslist.
Authorities say the seminarian believed the woman had agreed to take him to Tijuana and find three toddler girls to rape.
The priest-in-training, a 23-year-old named Joel A. Wright, picked up his duffle bag and walked out of the airport into the sunny California afternoon. And then, without warning, he was under arrest.
The woman he’d been talking with online was actually a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. The feds had been on Wright’s tail for months — and they were ready to charge him with two crimes relating to interstate travel with the purpose of having sex with children.
At his first appearance in U.S. District Court in San Diego, Wright declined to enter a plea and was ordered held. Wright’s court-appointed lawyers could not be reached for comment. And his mother declined to comment to BuzzFeed News.
But the federal criminal complaint filed against him outlines the sordid path Wright allegedly took to San Diego, and the unlikely collaborator who brought him down: A con-artist based in Mexico who trolled Craigslist for gullible Americans to scam.
Originally from Vermont, Wright was diagnosed with severe glaucoma as a young child, according to a profile of him published by the state’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. After graduating high school in 2010, he enrolled as a seminarian at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, where he has since been expelled for what the school called “heinous and reprehensible” allegations.
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