Windsor — For Windsor Police Chief Dennis Brown, the numbers weren't adding up at the start of his community forum on preventing sexual assault last night.

"I got a bunch of phone calls," Brown said while about a dozen residents trickled into the Windsor High School auditorium. "I expected more folks."

What last night's gathering lacked in the number of residents concerned in general about sexual predators, the neighbors of one of the town's newest residents, 56-year-old registered sex offender Thomas Pellerin, made up in intensity of concern for themselves and their children.

"He should have lost his rights the day he did what he did," Durkee Street resident Jennifer Murphy, a mother of two children, said of Pellerin, who recently completed a 12-year prison term for sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl at his video store in Bellows Falls. "What happened to my rights?

"They flew out the window when he moved next door."

Pellerin moved into Windsor last month, following his release from prison, after failing to find a place to live in Weathersfield, where he has relatives. His prior convictions include one in 1990 for lewd and lascivious conduct with a child, and one each in 1977 and 1973 for attempted statutory rape.

Pellerin also refused sex-offender treatment while serving in the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield — a fact that makes Murphy and other neighbors nervous. Jade Ennis, who with his wife Annalise owns a Durkee Street house next door to Pellerin's rooming house, asked how often treated and untreated offenders end up committing more sex crimes after serving prison time.

Bill Ballantyne, a child psychologist, said one recent national study showed that 18 percent of inmates who undergo treatment in prison backslide into similar behavior, while 43 percent of those who refuse or don't receive treatment re-offend.

In spite of those numbers, Brown, Windsor Police Sgt. Phil Call, Ballantyne and Erica Shambo, youth program coordinator for the New Beginnings program for victims of sexual abuse, all said that even if Pellerin weren't living next door, parents need to train their children to be on the lookout for predators from an early age. Brown noted that 19 registered sex offenders currently live in Windsor County, two of them in Windsor — and they tend to move around from town to town.

"Don't focus on one guy," Brown said. "Don't focus on one person and let your guard down for another."

The police officers said their department patrols more in the Durkee Street neighborhood, in part because of the tendency of young people to hang out around the Cumberland Farms convenience store, but they also urged parents to take a variety of defensive measures. Those include taking pictures of their children every six months, having them fingerprinted every three years, and even gathering hair samples and saliva samples for DNA testing, as well as teaching kids to bite, scream, kick, gouge and run away if they can.

"Predators don't want to go after children who are going to yell and scream," Shambo said. "They're going to go after children who are willing to keep a secret."

Brown and Call added that residents also need to consider putting locks on windows — or at least nailing them shut until they can buy locks — and taking other security measures, regardless of the presence of sex offenders next door. "You're going to have to modify your life — point blank," Brown said. "To be safer, you're going to have to do things differently. I can't go over there and say to (sex offenders who have served their time): ‘Out of here.'

"You're going to have to be a harder target."

Murphy said that since she learned of Pellerin's move to the neighborhood, she has been networking and carpooling with neighbors and friends to make sure they know where their children are at all times. While that is just the kind of action Brown and Call encouraged — "The thing we can do in this community is watch out for each other," Brown said — Murphy lamented having to take precautions her parents never did while she grew up in the house she occupies today.