During the 60 home visits, none of the six parole agents who supervised Garrido over the years noticed the electrical lines running from the Garrido house into the backyard and through the back fence to a shed hidden behind the fence.
California parole agents did not realize Garrido's property extended beyond the fence into a large hidden compound where he allegedly kept Dugard because they had not read his federal file, which included a diagram of the entire property, Shaw found.
Even when supervision of Garrido tightened over the last two years, agents missed critical clues. On June 17, 2008, his parole agent went to the home and found a 12-year-old girl there.
Garrido told the agent the girl was his brother's daughter. Authorities now believe she was Dugard's older daughter.
Parole supervisors skipped required reviews of Garrido's case 10 times, and an additional 15 times "completed case reviews but failed to identify and correct obvious deficiencies in the manner parole agents handled Garrido's case," the inspector general found.
Even after Garrido was placed on GPS supervision in April 2008, parole agents barely monitored his whereabouts, Shaw found.
Because he had mistakenly been classified as a low-risk offender, he was on "passive" GPS, meaning agents did not follow his movements in real time but could tell where he had gone.
He was told to get permission to go more than 25 miles from his home, but he routinely did so without consequence.
From April 2008 until July 2009, Garrido's GPS device alerted parole agents 335 times that its signal was not working for long periods.
"This was almost a nightly occurrence," Shaw's report states. "System records show that parole agents ignored 276 of these alerts altogether."
Once, when the device sent an alert that indicated the strap that connected it to Garrido's ankle may have come undone, his agent took no action, Shaw found.
There were other basic failures, as well.
Parole agents never talked to Garrido's neighbors, some of whom had expressed concerns about his odd behavior. One neighbor told Shaw's investigators he met Jaycee early on, something the report says could have been learned by vigilant parole agents "to further investigate Garrido and perhaps discover Jaycee."
"The neighbor described a conversation he had in the summer of 1991 – when he was about 8 years old – with a young blond girl through the chicken wire fence that used to separate his yard from Garrido's," the report says. "He said that the girl told him her name was Jaycee and she lived there.
"The neighbor reported that as he was talking to Jaycee, Garrido came out and took her into the house. Soon thereafter, Garrido built an eight-foot privacy fence that separated their yards."
Call The Bee's Sam Stanton, (916) 321-1091.
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