“MERIDIAN TWP. – A 34-year-old Okemos man and registered sex offender has been arraigned on felony criminal sexual conduct charges after police say he assaulted two children in a Meridian Township cemetery.
Joshua David Harding was arraigned today on two counts each of second-degree criminal sexual conduct and gross indecency, both felonies. He also was charged as a four-time habitual offender, Meridian Township police said. He was denied bond.
Township police said the assault happened Wednesday in a wooded area on the northern edge of East Lawn Memorial Gardens cemetery, in the 2400 block of Bennett Road. Police have not disclosed details of the reported assault on the children, a boy and a girl.
Police said Harding agreed to turn himself in after he was contacted by police.
Harding was convicted of assault with intent to commit sexual penetration for a 1999 offense and served eight years in state prison, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records. He later was convicted of two counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, a misdemeanor, for a 2011 offense, records show. He served more than two years in prison for that crime.
He is listed on Michigan’s sex offender registry, records show.”
The Wednesday before Spring Break is a bright sunny day….my goal is to get the boys outside and try and sell some mulch for the lacrosse fundraiser. We get out there about 4:30…..and we are up at the corner of Graystone and Sower at a house, and the boys see their friends run by, and we don’t think much of it, and we finish, and we go home.
About 45 minutes later there are more squad cards surrounding our neighborhood than we can count. Meridian Township Police, Ingham County Sheriff’s, State Police…they are everywhere. And it turns out the two kids that the boys say run by were the two that were assaulted…they were running to the retired policeman’s house after the incident.
We still don’t have all the details (the guy approached them, the 10-yr old girl wanted to leave but the 13-year old boy wanted to stay and it went downhill from there). The kids were playing in our backyard the weekend before we left; they were back there on the Sunday when we returned.
The thing that will stay with me for a while is that if those kids go back to the woods fairly often, most of the time they are accompanied by Cpher. And I wonder (I wonder a lot) what that incident would have been like if he would have been there. Would it even have started (the kids, like most kids, are quite a bit smaller than Cpher) if the guy saw this 6’-1” kid there? What would Cpher have done if the guy approached? The guy, by all reports, is big, 6-5’', 250 lbs……
