Gregory Lee Vogelsang, a 57-year-old convicted of kidnapping and molesting children as young as five, was granted parole by a three-person board in November. He had been sentenced to 355 years in prison. California is letting him out anyway.
Vogelsang was convicted on dozens of felony counts, including lewd acts on a child, kidnapping a child to commit a lewd act, and lewd acts on a child with force or violence. His victims were boys between the ages of five and eleven. The crimes occurred in the 1990s in Sacramento County. The sentence he received reflected the scale and depravity of what he did to at least six boys.
None of that mattered to the parole board. Vogelsang's release was granted under a law Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2020, which allows inmates who are 50 years and older and who have served 20 or more years behind bars to receive parole consideration.
According to Breitbart, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office detailed Vogelsang's crimes on Thursday, and what they described should disqualify any conversation about mercy or rehabilitation.
"In one case, a child reported Vogelsang persuaded him to get into his vehicle under the pretense of helping pick out a gift. The child was driven to a residence and repeatedly assaulted despite crying and asking him to stop."
That was one child. There were others.
"Another victim spent the night at Vogelsang's home nearly every weekend for years because he was friends with Vogelsang's family. During those visits, the abuse occurred repeatedly over an extended period of time."
Vogelsang exploited trust, proximity, and the innocence of children who had no capacity to protect themselves. He did it systematically and repeatedly. A court looked at the full scope of what he did and concluded that 355 years was the appropriate response. A three-person parole board decided otherwise.
At his parole hearing, Vogelsang reportedly said something that, in any rational system, would have sealed his continued imprisonment:
"When I don't view a child as a sex object, I don't want to become aroused, but I know it's always going to be there."
Read that again. He acknowledged, in his own words, that the compulsion is permanent. He did not claim to be cured. He did not argue that he was no longer a danger. He told the board, plainly, that his attraction to children will always be there. The board heard that and voted to release him.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho was blunt about the consequences:
"This inmate will molest again, and yet this parole board is letting him out."
That is not speculation from a political opponent. That is a county prosecutor who has reviewed the case, telling the public what he believes will happen next.
Vogelsang's case is not isolated. Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper pointed to another case that exposes the same systemic failure:
"The parole board is letting us down; they are horrible. After this case and the Funston case, they need to be gone, period."
The Funston case involves David Allen Funston, a child predator who was serving three life sentences. He was granted parole and ordered released in February under the same "Elderly Parole Program." Funston was only prevented from walking free because he was jailed in another county for separate crimes.
Two child predators. Two cases where sentences meant to keep dangerous men locked away for life were overridden by a parole mechanism designed in Sacramento and signed into law by the governor. The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office stated plainly that "California's elderly parole system is broken" and that "the public deserves to know how decisions like this are being made."
The Sheriff's Office also posted on social media that Vogelsang was "headed to a neighborhood near you." That is not hyperbole. It is a warning from the agency responsible for public safety in a county whose hands have been tied.
The mechanism here is straightforward. In 2020, Newsom signed a law creating the framework under which inmates 50 and older who have served 20 or more years can receive parole consideration. The law does not carve out exceptions for men sentenced to 355 years for serial child molestation. It does not require a parole board to weigh the severity of the original crime against the age-based eligibility. It treats a man who kidnapped and assaulted children the same as any other aging inmate who has served two decades.
This is what happens when criminal justice policy is built around abstract categories rather than the specific evil that put someone behind bars. The law's architects were presumably thinking about nonviolent offenders, overcrowded prisons, or second chances for people whose crimes were less grave. What they built, in practice, is a conveyor belt that moves child predators back into communities.
Authorities want the elderly parole program changed. But wanting and achieving are different things in a state where the political class that created the problem is still in charge.
Vogelsang has blamed alleged abuse by his father when he was a child for his own crimes. The therapeutic framing is familiar: the abused becomes the abuser, and the cycle is offered as context if not excuse. But six boys between five and eleven years old did not victimize themselves. Whatever happened to Vogelsang in his childhood does not reduce by one degree the terror of a child driven to a stranger's home and assaulted while crying and begging for it to stop.
A 355-year sentence was the justice system's way of saying: this man can never be trusted near children again. A parole board just told Sacramento County that the justice system's judgment no longer holds.
The parents of Sacramento County now face a reality that no law-abiding citizen should have to absorb. A man convicted of dozens of felony counts involving the kidnapping and molestation of children, a man who told a parole board his attraction to children will never go away, is being returned to the public.
The district attorney says he will reoffend. The sheriff says the parole board needs to be eliminated. The sheriff's office says the system is broken. Everyone in a position to know is sounding the alarm.
The only people who seem comfortable with this outcome are the three members of a parole board and the architects of a law that made their decision possible. When the next victim is found, and the DA has already said he believes there will be one, every one of them will own it.
