VICTORVILLE, Calif. - A long-haul truck driver was charged with abusing his two stepdaughters during road trips and fathering a child with one of them, authorities said Friday.
Tony Slone, a 43-year-old registered sex offender from Southern California, was arrested Thursday in Chester, N.Y., after his stepdaughters, ages 13 and 16, said he had sexually abused them over the last four years, said the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.
The elder daughter also told deputies that Slone was the father of her 13-month-old child.
Deputies on Friday arrested Slone's wife Anita, the girls' mother, in Victorville. They said she knew about the crimes and let her daughters go with her husband on truck trips in California, Nevada and Arizona where the abuse occurred.
"She admitted to police she knew her husband was the father of her daughter's child," said Kathleen DiDonato, deputy district attorney in San Bernardino County.
The Slones are from Phelan, an unincorporated area in San Bernardino County roughly 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Attempts to reach them were not immediately successful.
Deputies said they learned of the abuse when a high school student called them Tuesday and said she had seen sexual text messages on her friend's cell phone from the friend's stepfather.
Tony Slone is a registered sex offender in California. He was convicted in 1995 of lewd acts on a child and served an eight-year prison sentence, authorities said.
Authorities are seeking Tony Slone's extradition to California. He was arrested on a $1 million warrant at a warehouse where he had arrived for a trucking job and was being held in Orange County, N.Y., said Chester police Chief Peter J. Graziano Jr.
Slone is charged with two counts of continual sexual abuse, one count of lewd acts upon a child and one count of forcible rape. Anita Slone is charged with one count of child abuse and was expected to be arraigned on Monday in Victorville.