Convicted sex offender attempts taking
14-year-old Girl

LUBBOCK, TX  –  A Lubbock man has been arrested and charged with attempt to compel prostitution after he allegedly approached a 14-year-old girl at a 7-11 gas station on Parkway Drive on Tuesday.

The man has also been identified as a registered sex offender.

According to Lubbock police documents, just after 1:30 p.m., officers responded to the gas station after reports of an attempted kidnapping.  The victim, a 14-year-old girl, was fueling up her mother’s car while her mother paid inside.

Reports say 53-year-old Ricky James Overhulser pulled up next to the girl and told her to get into his car.  The girl refused and Overhulser told her again to get in his car and she refused a second time.  He then asked her if she “dated.”  She told him “no” and went into the store to get her mother.

“She got pretty startled, as a 14-year-old would, as you can imagine,” Lt. Ray Mendoza, Lubbock Police Department, says.

Police say when the mother came outside, Overhulser had driven away.  She was finishing fueling up her car when he returned, pulled up close to her car and fanned cash while he asked, “how much for your daughter.”  The girl’s mother called him a “dirty old man” and let him know she was calling police.

Overhulser drove away in a white Pontiac passenger car.

Mendoza says the mother and daughter were able to get a license plate number.

“The detectives get called to the scene, they immediately go looking for him, try to hunt him down,” he says.  “We put out a broadcast to all our local officers.  We reached out to DPS, the sheriff’s department, to be on the lookout.”

Enough information was gathered to obtain an arrest warrant late Wednesday night.

“He had a couple of municipal court warrants, so they were at least, trying to arrest him while the investigators continued to work the case,” Mendoza explains.

Overhulser was already in the Lubbock County Jail on unrelated charges and was re-arrested on the new charges.

Overhulser has been a registered sex offender since 2000, where his victim was a 16-year-old female, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety sex offender registry.  He spent 10 years in jail, from 2000 until 2010.

“Always report any kind of suspicious behavior,” Mendoza says.  “The citizens are our eyes and ears. If you see something, say something.”