A 36-year-old Benton man arrested on suspicion of exposing himself to young girls around Little Rock threw himself on the mercy of the court on Monday by pleading guilty to all three sex charges against him.
Brandon Charles Runion's guilty plea to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson comes less than a week after a police detective described for the judge the monthslong search in 2012 for a masked man who had been performing lewd acts in front of children.
Runion, a part-time filmmaker who sometimes uses the name Brody Chaze, admitted Monday, according to deputy prosecuting attorney Kelly Ward, to exposing his genitals to children for sexual gratification three times in September 2012.
About a week before Runion's arrest that month, police had finally gathered enough evidence to put a tracking device on his 2008 Jeep Cherokee.
A detective who was part of a team that had him under surveillance saw Runion performing a lewd act in front of a 14-year-old girl. He also was charged with doing the same in front of two girls four days before his arrest.
Each of the three charges of sexual indecency with a child carries a maximum of six years in prison, meaning that Runion faces up to 18 years behind bars at an April 29 sentencing hearing.
Runion, the father of a 13-year-old girl, is free on bail awaiting sentencing.
North Little Rock police reports show that on Jan. 17, 2009, Runion was barred from McCain Mall after a 37-year-old woman identified him as the man who had exposed himself to her from a moving car as she walked into Dillards. The man's face was covered with a black bandana, and he was driving an unlicensed two-door silver Honda Civic, according to the report.
The woman pointed the car out to police, but it drove away before they could stop it. The vehicle's description was broadcast, and another officer stopped the car, which was being driven by Runion, before it could leave mall property.
Runion agreed to let police search his car and they found a black bandana on the passenger seat with a rubber "Halloween-style" mask under the seat.
After those discoveries, Runion withdrew his permission for the police search, and he was allowed to leave with the bandana and mask after mall security told him he was no longer allowed at the mall, according to the report.
In January 2007, Runion pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to five years' probation for trying to abduct a high school student from McCain Mall on the day before Thanksgiving 2004.
According to police reports and court records, the 18-year-old woman did not tell authorities for six weeks that she had been accosted in the mall parking lot by a man in his 20s who had tried to pull her inside the red Chevrolet Blazer he was driving.
Police weren't told about the failed abduction until January 2005, when the woman encountered the man again. This time he was driving a white four-door vehicle and asking for directions at her school, the North Little Rock High West Campus.
The teenager walked away from that encounter but Runion was arrested in March 2005 after she reported seeing the man a second time at the school in the same white vehicle. Other girls told police the driver had been asking them when lunch period started.
Police stopped Runion, who was driving a 1998 white Ford Contour, and the 18-year-old picked him out of a police photographic lineup as the man who had tried to abduct her at McCain Mall.
Metro on 02/09/2016