Jaycee Dugard Sues U.S. Government Over 'Failure' to Monitor her Captor and Rapist

Jaycee Dugard has sued the federal government for not properly monitoring Phillip Garrido, the man who abducted her when she was 11 and held her for 18 years.

Garrido kidnapped Dugard off a Northern California street in 1991, when she was walking to her school and kept her in his backyard for 18 years, where Garrido repeatedly raped her and forced her to give birth to two of his sons.

Garrido had multiple records of kidnapping and forcible rape in the past. Even before kidnapping Dugard, he had been sentenced to 50 years in prison for abducting and repeatedly raping a 25-year-old woman. Dugard says the parole officers were responsible for monitoring him since the day he was released in 1988.

But instead of keeping an eye on the convicted criminal, the federal parole thanked him for his cooperation in the prison.

“The federal government had parole supervision responsibility over Mr. Garrido from the day he was released in 1988 and remained responsible on the day she was kidnapped in 1991 through 1999,” said the statement.

In the initial eight years, the parole officers from the California Department of Corrections visited the Garrido’s home many times, But they couldn’t help Dugard, who was kept in the backyard of the same house.

Had the officers performed their duty and monitored Garrido properly, they could have saved Jaycee long back, Dugard's lawyers alleged.

Dugard had sued the state of California in 2010, and was paid $20 million as the compensation but now she has filed a lawsuit over the failure of federal parole officers to monitor her captor, Phillip Garrido.

According to The Associated Press, the complaint filed in the U.S. court in San Francisco says that the mistakes and negligence committed by the parole officers in handling the case are as “outrageous and inexcusable as they are numerous.”

The lawsuit also states that Dugard tried to reach a private settlement with the U.S. government twice prior, but was denied both times.

Any money recovered from the lawsuit will go to the JAYC Foundation that she launched to help families of abduction victims, the ABC reports.

Garrido was arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 36 years of life imprisonment in June, and currently, he and his wife are serving life sentences.

“Government attorneys were yet to make a determination about how we will ultimately respond in court,” said Charles Miller, a spokesman at the U.S. Department of Justice, according to Globalpost news.