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October 25, 2017 - 4:33 PM
CONTENT ADVISORY
KAMLOOPS - A Kamloops man who was caught in an FBI child pornography investigation will be behind bars for at least the next year.
The 38-year-old contractor took and distributed pictures of a cousin's young daughter in provocative poses, court has heard, but it wasn’t discovered until two years after the photographs were taken.
An undercover FBI detective operating out of Washington D.C. connected with the man over a website often used by people searching for child pornography, Crown prosecutor Katie Bouchard told Kamloops Provincial Court today, Oct. 25.
The now convicted sex offender exchanged messages with the undercover detective through the website, and eventually through a mobile app. The Kamloops man sent the detective a number of provocative photographs of his four-year-old relative in February of this year.
He cannot be identified due to a court-ordered publication ban which protects the identity of the young girl.
The undercover detective sent the man an email on Feb. 14 wanting to know if the Kamloops man’s child pornography was “homemade.” The next day, he confirmed it was and said that’s why he didn’t have a lot of it yet.
But he told the undercover detective he’d have more soon, saying the girl, who he falsely identified as his daughter, would be coming to his house that weekend.
“As a result of that, the police acted quickly,” Provincial Court Judge Roy Dickey told the court in his decision on sentencing.
Bouchard told the court that the FBI made an emergency request to the messaging app in which the two men were communicating due to the safety of the child, and the fact that the man was planning on seeing her within the next few days.
The bureau then handed the investigation over to Canadian authorities after tracking the man’s information to Kamloops.
“Police began their plan to arrest (him),” Bouchard told the court.
On Feb. 17, police conducted surveillance on the man’s Kamloops home and when he pulled up to his property in his work vehicle, officers arrested him. He was taken into custody and in a warned statement to police, Bouchard said, admitted to the exchanges with the undercover officer and identified the young girl as his cousin's daughter.
Bouchard said the man called the young girl’s father while he was with police and apologized for taking “inappropriate pictures” of the child two years prior.
Police conducted a search on all of the man’s electronic devices but none contained child pornography, Bouchard said. However, one of his cell phones was broken during his arrest and the other was password-protected. Bouchard said despite investigators’ best efforts they were unable to access the contents of either phone.
The man did have several computer searches alluding to child pornography between May 2010 and November 2012, Bouchard said, including “hidden camera in changeroom,” “daddy daughter sex,” and “underage crack whore.”
He was also sentenced on other charges including breaching his release conditions, first by being around and hugging a customer’s seven-year-old daughter in June.
Weeks later, a woman whose rental unit was undergoing renovations by him reported to police that the man had entered her suite uninvited and unannounced, after not working at the unit for weeks. He was charged and sentenced for being unlawfully in a dwelling house.
Bouchard called his actions toward her “strange and somewhat creepy” behaviour.
Just last month, Crown also discovered the man had breached another one of his release conditions and he was held in custody again.
Bouchard asked for a 14-and-a-half to 18-and-a-half-month jail sentence followed by two to three years of probation, while defence lawyer Don Campbell asked Dickey to consider a sentence on the lower range of that time frame.
Campbell also told the court his client suffered from drug addiction and had relapsed in 2016 after being sober for two years. He said the man looks at pornography when he's on drugs, and has an "addictive" personality.
Dickey called crimes against minors “deplorable and reprehensible” before sentencing the man to a 15-and-a-half month jail sentence. He must also spend the three years after his release on probation with strict conditions including no contact with the victim or her family, no going to parks, pools, or anywhere children are likely to be, no contact with minors, no alcohol or drugs, no access to a device which can access the internet, no pornography and no possessing firearms.
He must also register as a sex offender for the next 20 years.
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News from © iNFOnews, 2017