Tragedy Inspires Bereaved Father to Improve Online Safety

Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent -- especially if the child is killed by an Internet predator.

Reza Jou, a NASA employee in Houston, knows that pain, and he has vowed to do all he can to prevent any other parent from going through his pain.

Three years ago, Jou's daughter, San Diego State University honor student Donna Jou, vanished after meeting up with a man who responded to her tutoring service ad on an online classifieds site.

The man turned out to be John Steven Burgess, a three-time convicted sexual predator.

Because Donna's body has not been found, Burgess was charged only for involuntary manslaughter. He is serving a five-year prison sentence and is due to be released next year.

"Half of me is gone," Jou told AOL News. "I don't feel like a whole person. My family and I have lost our young and precious daughter forever, and we just cannot get over our loss. I want to make sure this doesn't happen to anybody else's daughter."

Although other people in his situation might contemplate violence, Jou, who emigrated from Iran more than 30 years ago, never saw that as an option.

"Revenge is no solution," he said. "We live in the most civilized country in the world."

However, Jou did believe that Donna's death might have been avoided had the online classifieds site she used to advertise her business employed the same stringent security measures used by Amazon.com or eBay.

Amazingly, in the aftermath of Burgess' conviction, Jou found a solution to that problem in the form of a blog posting from a businessman named Karim Pirani, the president and founder of SafeList.com, a website that requires users to submit to questions to confirm who they are before gaining access to the site's core features.

Pirani came up with the idea not because of a personal tragedy but because he saw a market disconnect with sites like craigslist.org.

"If you see a must-have item on eBay, what do you do?" Pirani asked rhetorically. "You look up the seller's ratings, then you can buy through PayPal, which gives you a certain amount of protection. Craigslist has no PayPal, so a transaction is like Russian roulette. People are nonchalant where they should be vigiliant."

To become a verified user of SafeList, individuals must submit themselves to a series of questions based on their personal life history that the system pulls from a comprehensive public database. They must correctly answer these questions within 240 seconds.

In additon, failure to respond correctly will keep the person at the basic user level, and SafeList will also report any convicted felon or sexual predator that attempts to register on the website to law enforcement.

Pirani came up with the idea months ago, but says "naysayers" told him the idea that anyone would leave craigslist.org was ridiculous.

However, since incidents like the tragedy that befell Jou's daughter, Pirani's business venture is being seen as a sound investment and the wave of the future.

"One of my employees worked at Match.com, and she told me this could change the dynamics of online dating, because people can ask their potential partners to submit to a background check on SafeList.com as a prerequisite for dating," Pirani said.

Jou, for his part, has invested in the company for that reason, but also as a way to turn his daughter's death into something positive.

"If it happened to her, it could happen to anyone," he said. "Everyone needs Internet access, but my goal is to find a solution or an alternative to the online classified sites that are used by criminals to abduct children.

"I want to help people not to fall like my child."

Currently, SafeList is available only in San Diego, but other West Coast cities are expected to be added in 2011.