ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — What started as a pilot program in 2013 has now graduated hundreds of people who thought their service to our country was over.
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It’s called the Hero Corps. The program recruits, trains, and hires wounded, ill, or injured transitioning active-duty service members and military veterans for employment as computer forensic analysts.
Channel 9′s Shannon Butler will tell you about a wounded warrior whose deep love of country has taken him from the battlefield to battling sexual predators.
Steve Alvarez spent 21 years in the army as a medic and has seen things most of us cannot imagine. “I did see a lot of bad stuff. I was on three combat tours. I was a line medic and senior line medic. I was right there for the injuries,” said Alvarez.
When his time was up, he had to think about what to do next. Like so many who serve in our armed forces, serving is a calling, and he’s answering it one more time by taking on one of the more challenging jobs at Homeland Security.
Now, he is an analyst looking for sexual predators online.
Alvarez says, “I want to be there to help our country and citizens. Our most important commodity is the children. Because I mean, knowing that people stick up for them, and I want to defend them.”
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Alvarez is part of the Hero Corps internship program, which has graduated 200 Homeland Security employees over the last 11 years.
One hundred sixty still works for him, including Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville.
Day in and out, he and others assist special agents with investigations to rescue the most vulnerable.
They disassemble suspects’ computers, look through hard drives and prepare that data for analysis by investigative agents.
“I can mentally deal with it because I was wounded on my first tour and I still went back a couple more times. And I knew I mentally had the mental toughness and the resiliency to push through it.”
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According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, they received more than 36,000,000 reports of suspected child exploitation. This number is up 12 percent from last year.
Financial sextortion and the use of generative AI in child sexual exploitation are on the rise.
“You have to be a special kind of person, don’t you think, to sit in that computer and look through those things?
I don’t know. Special. Just. Was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy. But you must have the resiliency and strength to do that because it is hard to go through. But again, it’s for the greater cause. It’s for the greater good. And again, someone has to protect these children,” Alvarez stated.
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