High-risk sex offender Michael Stanley speaks after fleeing Canada

EDMONTON- A high-risk sex offender- who fled Canada after cutting off his electronic monitoring bracelet- is speaking out.

“October 1, I had enough. I said ‘I’m leaving this country because it hasn’t been good to me,'” Michael Stanley said Friday afternoon.

Global News obtained video of an interview between Stanley and a Seattle news reporter Friday. Stanley says he crossed into the United States from B.C. early last week to “start off fresh and live a free life.”

“I got stranded in B.C. because I had no I.D. so I couldn’t get a room. I had money. So I was just walking the streets, just trying to bide my time until I got to the border because I wanted to find out what they were going to do,” Stanley explained. “I was actually going to go to a police station there to find out what they were going to do because I wasn’t in the province of Alberta anymore.

“I got a bus ticket, came to the border. I knew something was going to be happening. They pulled me, they shackled me, everything. They checked the warrant, they said B.C. didn’t want to act on it because it was (an) Alberta provincial warrant. And then they said ‘well, if they’re not acting on it you’re free there. You don’t have no warrants in America, you’re free to go.’ So I crossed over on the bus… They let me go through.”

U.S. officials allowed him to cross the border after determining he was an American citizen and not the subject of an extraditable arrest warrant. Authorities say Stanley is not being arrested because Canada has decided not to seek his extradition and he is not wanted for any crimes in the United States.

Read More: Alberta won’t try to extradite convicted sex offender

Alberta Justice acknowledged Stanley’s violent record, but said the charges he is currently facing “do not typically warrant engaging the extradition process.” The department said it was prepared to prosecute him if he tried to return to Canada.

Police located the 48-year-old in Seattle on Thursday. He has registered himself as a sex offender with the King County Sheriff’s Office. Seattle police say he is required to check-in with the authorities once a week.

“I told them, I said ‘you guys can watch me. I don’t care, you can walk down the street with me. But you’re not going to catch me doing anything.'”

Stanley has a long history of sexual offences against women and children dating back to 1987.

He had been missing since October 1, when he left Edmonton and cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet.

Read More: Police hunting for high-risk sex offender who removed monitoring device

Stanley’s criminal record in Canada includes a 32-month prison term for assault and forcible confinement involving two mentally challenged boys.

Parole board records say he lured the boys into a washroom, blew crack smoke in their faces and then sexually assaulted them.

Parole records also detail the sexual assault of an elderly woman and outline charges that he exposed himself to kids.

The board determined that Stanley posed a risk to reoffend and kept him behind bars until his warrant expiry date, the final day of his sentence, in 2011.

He was being monitored by police under a peace bond with conditions, including one ordering him to stay away from children.

Follow @CaleyRamsay

With files from Kiro TV and The Canadian Press.