Homeless sex offenders moving out of South Ozone Park neighborhood

SOUTH OZONE PARK (WABC) -- There's a victory for some "not in my backyard" activists in Queens. They have been upset for years that dozens of registered sex offenders were being housed near a school.

Turns out, the men now have to move out of the South Ozone Park shelter because the facility is closer to the school than the law allows.

"Ever since they did that, my daughter can't even come here to play basketball," said John Olsen, a neighbor.

Neighbors like John Olsen say it never really felt right, sending kids to PS/MS 124 with dozens of convicted sex offenders, living in the skyway homeless shelter just down the street.

"We don't want to wait for something bad to happen and then say we should have done something sooner," said Eileen Lamanna, the PTA president.

But city officials insisted that the shelter was more than the required 1,000 feet from the school.

Councilmember Ruben Wills was so skeptical, he went out and measured the distance, himself, and it came to 919.5 feet.

City inspectors had measured the distance from the shelter to the front door of the school, and not the school's playground.

"Out of haste, out of arrogance, out of following or hiding behind emergency declarations, this is what the city did. And we spoke to the city in the beginning and said, 'I believe you are going to house, warehouse, sexual offenders, near a center.' They told us absolutely not," Wills said.

The school is not exactly next door to the homeless shelter, in fact, it is more than three football fields from the homeless shelter. It's about a four minute walk between the two locations.

"It takes a pedophile two seconds to grab a kid and bring them in the back over there," Olsen said.

City officials say the men will be moved out.

But the real problem, they insist, is that many convicted sex offenders are being released directly into the shelter system without notice.

"We are being inundated with sex offenders and ex-offenders in general by the State Department of Corrections, and that's not a good thing. The State Department of Corrections is creating a crisis for us, said Lillian Barrios-Paoli, NYC Deputy Mayor.