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After being “caught” on NBC’s Dateline: To Catch a Predator show, William Conradt Jr. killed himself and now Conradt’s sister has successfully filed a lawsuit against NBC blaming the TV show for her brothers death.
The suit was brought by the sister of William Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney in Rockland County, Texas, who shot himself in the head after a local police SWAT team, accompanied by a Dateline crew, surrounded his house and moved in to arrest him in November 2006.Conradt’s suicide was at the center of an ABC News 20/20 investigation looking into troubling questions for both law enforcement and the news media raised by the popular Dateline series.
Conradt’s sister Patricia told 20/20 the police broke in and then headed down a hallway to the bedroom where her brother was waiting for them with a gun in his hand.”They came in, and they see him,” Patricia said. “He says, ‘Guys, I’m not gonna hurt anybody.’ And then he put the gun to his head and shot.”William Conradt died shortly after a helicopter called in landed at a Dallas hospital.Walter Weiss, a former detective with the police department that partnered with Dateline, and who has since left the force in disgust, told 20/20, “I understand he took his own life, but I have a feeling that he took his own life when he looked out the door and saw there was a bunch of television cameras outside.”When Conradt did not take the bait to go to the sting house set up by Dateline and Perverted Justice, a civilian watchdog group hired as a paid consultant by NBC, the decision was made to go get him at his home in Terrell, Texas. [ABC News]
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Tagged as:20/20 Texas • ABC • child predator • Chris Hanson • Dateline • NBC • Perverted Justice • Rockland County • suicide • To Catch a Predator • William Conradt Jr
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