McEntee: Crime and punishment in child pornography, sexual abuse - PART-2

2-24-2010 Utah:

Over the course of a month, Peg McEntee spent days and nights interviewing and riding along with investigators from Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force as they traced, tracked down and confronted suspected producers and consumers of child pornography. She will report on the problem, and law enforcement officers' efforts to stop it, in four columns between today and Feb. 28. A warning: The columns include explicit descriptions of sexual abuse.

Online, he called himself Brents39, and he was very interested in Lindsey. He pursued her, day after day, in August 2006.

Lindsey was a young teenager, chatting with Brent on her computer, her bedroom door closed so her mother wouldn't know.

"I'm excited," Lindsey says.

"Me too, hon," Brent replies.

Lindsey: "Geez let me at least see what u look like."

His image appears on her screen, a naked, middle-aged man with an erection. "Don't let your mom see."

Brent's real. Lindsey is Capt. Rhett McQuiston of the Internet Crimes Against Children task force. He's an acknowledged master of the prepubescent-girl-online ruse that case agents use to track down and arrest men like Brent.

Brent's case file details his obsession with Lindsey, ultimately setting up a meeting behind a church near Riverview Junior High. "I really want you hon," he writes.

Brent shows up, and so does McQuiston and fellow ICAC agents. Brent tells them he only wanted to scare Lindsey, to tell her of the Internet's dangers and that she shouldn't be meeting strangers she encountered online.

Brent is arrested. Agents find some 200 images of child pornography on his home computer. He's still at Utah State Prison.

Chat rooms are just one means of tracking predators down. During ICAC's Operation Frostbite in January, agents used high-powered computers to pinpoint suspects. They deploy for knock-and-talks - preliminary conversations - and serve search warrants, then warrants to seize computers, and arrest warrants.

Here are some examples of what I saw last month:

On one run, case agent Dave Artis and three other officers served a search warrant at a Main Street apartment.

At first, it doesn't go well. The occupant wouldn't open the door, so Artis kicks it in. Another agent videotapes the whole operation, and I watch as soon as they come back to their offices.

Inside, they find filth. Thirty or more empty cans of cat food on the kitchen floor and fast-food bags everywhere. Mold around the toilet. A bare bed; at its foot a computer monitor and three hard-drives full of child pornography. A singular bit of evidence, often found in such homes, are the many bottles full of urine the men use so they don't have to take their eyes off the screen.

"I wish you could put the smell" on the tape, one agent says.

"These guys get so addicted to child porn that every waking moment is spent with it," says McQuiston, then commander of the ICAC unit. "The house goes to garbage. Nothing else matters."



Another night, case agent Steve Gamvroulas leads a team to serve an arrest warrant at a big, newer home in Murray. The suspect is a businessman who has talked on the phone with his daughter's 14-year-old boyfriend, asking about their relationship, if the boy masturbates, the size of his penis.

Gamvroulas takes the man outside and handcuffs him. His bewildered wife comes out, and Farnsworth explains the charges against her husband -- a state count of dealing harmful material to a minor.

As is very often the case, the wife knows nothing about her husband's secret. She cries, and Gamvroulas lets her talk to him in the car. The man tells her to bring the cash he has hidden in his sock drawer to jail.



The exemplar of child pornography and child sexual abuse is a man the task force arrested on Jan. 10. Sometime in the last few years, he befriended a Utah woman and her young son. He recorded himself raping the boy, and distributed the video online and around the world. Then he went on the run. Jeff Ross, an FBI agent working with ICAC, got the case and the cooperation of the mother and her child, who was rescued and now is doing well.

Ross worked with the mother to lure the man back to Utah with the promise of a skiing vacation. Agents, awakened early, busted him on Jan. 10. The following Tuesday, Ross and the rest of the team were jubilant.

Ross described how the woman had worked the phone to bring the man to Utah. "She was so nervous she was ready to throw up," he said. "But she was calm when she talked to the guy."

Says Capt. Jessica Farnsworth, the task force's field commander, "I don't know if any of us would be so calm."

Ross describes the arrest: "He was very smug. He was willing to admit what we had him on, but denied everything else. The prosecutor told the mom today he's looking at life in prison."

The man is charged with a federal count of production of child pornography and trafficking it across state and national borders. Since his arrest, agents have identified two more victims.



The criminals - who possess child pornography, who attack children - span the lines of age, race, religion or socioeconomic status. Perpetrators are nearly always men, although some women have been charged with sexual abuse. The criminals can be teachers, cops, clergy, business owners, minimum-wage earners, physicians.

Early in life, many feel a sense of rejection, are socially inept and can't have healthy relationships, says Michael Robinson, director of the Sex Offender Therapy Program at Utah State Prison.

They self-isolate, maybe get into adult porn, and then find the child pornography irresistible. All too often, though, they get bored, and cross the line with live children. They rationalize that they'll never get caught, Robinson says, and convince themselves they're not hurting anyone.

Getting therapy in prison is crucial, he adds. The men are told to be honest about all encounters with children, not just the one they get busted for. (The program protects the men from mandatory reporting to ensure their cooperation.)

Through therapy, and with an emphasis on honesty and accountability, the men are much more likely to make a lasting change -- not least because they don't want to go through the prison system again, Robinson says.

But those who have never been caught, he adds, "are still out there perpetrating."

Another thing that Farnsworth told me was horrifying: Craig Gregerson lived next door to Destiny Norton, the Salt Lake City child who was murdered in 2006. He had taken her into his home, smothered her and then sexually abused her body.

He also had "lots" of child pornography on his home computer, "Farnsworth says. "He wants sex, he gets scared, and he kills her." ..Source..