MANKATO — The on-again, off-again move to Mankato is on again for a level three predatory offender who is now set to move into the 1700 block of North Riverfront Drive.
Gregory Eugene Ward, 46, is to move to the block early next month. A community notification meeting has been scheduled by the Mankato Department of Public Safety for 6 p.m. Thursday at at the Verizon Wireless Center ballroom.
A meeting that had been scheduled to take place in April was canceled after Ward’s move was delayed after two address changes. He has been in the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Lino Lakes since March 2011, according to Department of Correction records. He is now scheduled to be released July 9.
Local police officers and representatives from the Department of Corrections will provide information about Ward’s background at the community meeting and explain why he was determined to be a level three predatory offender. The label is given to those offenders considered to be most likely to offend again and is based on psychological reviews completed near the end of an offender’s prison term.
Mankato police had an outstanding warrant for Ward’s arrest for about 14 years before he was arrested in the city in October 2010. Police had received a tip that he was at a Mankato apartment complex visiting his mother.
Ward had several run-ins with area law enforcement agencies investigating reports of sex-related crimes during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, when Ward was 19 years old, he attacked a woman on the Sakatah Trail. The victim told police Ward was in a car and met her at several points along the trail. He fondled himself at one of the trail’s intersections with a road and physically attacked her at another intersection, the victim reported. He was attempting to remove the woman’s clothes before a group of people in a passing car stopped to help.
Ward was found guilty of molesting a 7-year-old child he knew in Scott County in 1994 and, after spending less than a year in jail, was arrested again in Blue Earth County for indecent exposure.
A victim in Florida reported more predatory offenses after he moved there around 1999. He was charged with stalking in Florida for a 2006 incident.
When Ward was to move to Mankato in April, he originally listed an apartment in the 800 block of South Broad Street as his address. That address was changed to an apartment in the 400 block of South Front Street shortly before the April notification meeting was canceled
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