Jacobs found herself with an uneasy feeling she could not immediately convert into specific legal grounds for detention. Garrido had not committed an observable crime during the meeting. The girls showed no obvious signs of physical injury. The background check had revealed his criminal history and his parole status, but his parole officer was already presumably aware of those facts—that was the nature of parole. There was no immediate cause to hold Garrido.
But there was the parole angle. Campbell and Jacobs notified Garrido’s parole officer about the visit. The call conveyed two pieces of information: first, that Garrido had visited the Berkeley campus seeking a permit; second, that he had two young daughters with him.
The parole officer’s reaction to the second piece of information was immediate. Garrido had no young daughters on record. The parole officer ordered Garrido to report to the parole office the following day.
“He said, ‘I’ve done some bad things in my life,'” Jacobs later recalled Garrido saying during the August 25 meeting—an admission to something without specifying what, a comment that she would later understand in the fullness of what followed.
—
## August 25: The Night Before
The OIG report’s account of what happened after the August 25 campus meeting adds a layer of institutional failure to the story that is easily overlooked in the narrative of the campus encounter as the turning point.
Jacobs had notified the parole office by voicemail, and the parole office’s reaction was to summon Garrido for the following day. But investigators also went to Garrido’s Antioch property on the evening of August 25, before the next-morning appointment. What happened at the property that evening was a near-miss.