Sex offender vanishes after removing GPS monitor in San Diego County

Merle Wakefield was supposed to be tracked. The 69-year-old convicted sex offender had been on conditional release since November 2024, fitted with a GPS monitor that was meant to keep him visible to authorities and, by extension, to the community he lived in. On Friday morning at 3:30 a.m., that monitor sent an alert from a worksite in Rancho Bernardo: tamper mode. When Liberty Healthcare, the state contractor responsible for supervising him, arrived at the location, they found the device removed and Wakefield gone.

By Sunday, two days after he vanished, he remained missing. The San Diego County Sheriff's Office said it was working diligently to locate him, but the damage was already done. Wakefield had violated the terms of his conditional release, and now he was wanted. He was convicted in 1980 of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14, and again in 1991 of rape by force. Nearly half a century of supervision and restriction had ended in the time it took for a monitor to alert and a contractor to drive to an address.

Local officials had seen this coming. Before Wakefield's release was finalized in October 2024, a San Diego judge had granted him what's called a transient release—meaning he would have no fixed address, no designated home where he was required to stay. It was the third attempt to place him somewhere in the county. An earlier proposal would have put him in a Poway home near a school and park, which prompted residents to organize against it. Poway's mayor, Steve Vaus, argued that a transient release amounted to a shell game that put the community at risk. The San Diego County District Attorney's Office agreed, warning that without a fixed residence, monitoring and supervision would be severely limited.

State Senator Brian Jones had raised similar concerns at the time. He questioned where Wakefield would actually live—on the streets, in a hotel paid for by taxpayers—and noted that while the state promised a tracking device, the practical reality of supervision seemed uncertain. Jones had called for an audit of California's sexually violent predator program, which found that roughly 36 percent of participants had violated the terms of their release. He argued the state should keep such offenders in hospitals rather than release them into neighborhoods.

The California Department of State Hospitals pushed back on the criticism, saying the court makes the final decision on conditional release and that the supervision program included GPS monitoring, unannounced home visits, and surveillance. Breaking the rules, they said, could send someone back to a state hospital. Wakefield's court order, according to reporting before his release was finalized, called for 24-hour in-person supervision wherever he stayed. That requirement, like the GPS monitor itself, proved insufficient.

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond renewed his objections after Wakefield disappeared. "The state released him into our community in November 2024 and promised he'd be monitored and supervised," Desmond wrote on Facebook. "Less than two years later, he's missing and wanted." He called Wakefield a convicted child molester and violent rapist, and criticized the state for saying nothing publicly about the disappearance. "These people do not belong back out in the community," Desmond wrote. "They belong in a state hospital or in jail."

Authorities described Wakefield as 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 230 pounds, with brown eyes. They warned the public not to approach him if spotted, and asked anyone with information to call 911 or local law enforcement. The incident had reignited a debate that had never really ended—whether California's approach to managing sexually violent predators struck the right balance between rehabilitation and public safety, or whether it had tilted too far toward release into communities that had never asked for the risk.