Gainesville, Florida- When Shirley White-Satcher’s 12-year-old son sat down Sunday night to watch what she thought was a Disney movie checked out from the library, what he saw instead horrified her.
The movie, “Home on the Range,” ended up being a graphic porno flick that came from the Alachua County Headquarters Library at 401 E. University Ave. in downtown Gainesville.
“I stepped out of the room for 30 seconds after the movie started playing and he ran in and said, ‘Mommy, there’s nasty stuff on the TV,’ ” White-Satcher told The Sun Wednesday evening.
White-Satcher, 49, said her son, Zaham Mobley, checked out the movie, along with others, April 14 during a visit to the library. “It was totally disgusting, and I didn’t need my child to see it,” she said.
She contacted the Gainesville Police Department but never filed an incident report and decided to contact the news media. She added that she has not contacted the library because she wanted to get “documentation” by law enforcement or the news media of the tape’s content
Sol Hirsch, director of the Alachua County Library District, said his employees do not recall anything like this happening before. Hirsch said he didn’t find out about the tape until he was contacted by the news media. He said if the mother had notified the library, immediate action could have been taken to protect other patrons who had checked out that movie by contacting them to make sure other copies did not have the same explicit material on them.
“If this actually occurred, it’s despicable that someone would do this and victimize a person who would rent a movie,” Hirsch said in a phone interview Wednesday evening.
Hirsch said that while the library does not screen each of its videos for content, inventory control numbers on the materials checked out are matched with their cases in case people mix up items when they are returned.
“We circulate over 300,000 items a year – that’s about 600,000 hours, which is a lot of screening,” Hirsch said. “We still don’t have the tape back. It’s a sick thing to do, and it takes quite an effort and time to sabotage a VHS tape. As soon as we get our hands on it, we’re going to pursue it aggressively with law enforcement and get to the bottom of this.”