Woman pleads guilty in Ontario County
child sex abuse case
Canandaigua, N.Y. (WHAM) - The woman accused of sexually abusing at least one child with her boyfriend pleaded guilty to sex crime charges, according to the Ontario County District Attorney's Office.
Simonds pleaded guilty last month to two counts of criminal sex act 1st, one count of sex abuse 1st and one count of promoting an obscene performance of a child.
Simonds' boyfriend at the time, Tristan Mayes, was accused of committing
sexual acts against a one-year-old girl and six-year-
old boy. State Police said from March 2015 and June 2016, Mayes took video and still images of himself engaging sexual contact with a one-year-old girl. Simonds was accused of engaging in sexual contact with Mayes while the children were abused.
In March, Mayes was sentenced to 28 years to life after being convicted of two counts of predatory sexual assault against a child. The sentence was imposed as 14 years to life, with each of the two counts being served consecutively. He is currently serving the sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility.
Simonds faces 22 years in prison and 20 years post-supervised released when she is sentenced. Her sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 14.
Child Sexual Abuse Earns DC Man Prison Sentence
A DC man was sentenced to 8-and-a-half years in prison for
sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl in 2015.
By Cameron Luttrell (Patch Staff)
WASHINGTON, DC — A DC man was sentenced to 8-and-a-half years in prison for sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl in 2015, the U.S. Attorney's Office of DC announced. Urlick Evans, 41, pled guilty to first-degree child sexual abuse in March 2017.
According to a statement of offense submitted during the plea proceedings, the 15-year-old victim ran away from her home in Baltimore and made contact with her estranged father in DC. She stayed with her father for about a week until she met Evans, who was 39 at the time.
The girl initially told Evans that she was 18, and he invited her to his Southeast Washington apartment, prosecutors said. Once she was there, Evans sexually abused the girl.
Shortly after, Evans was contacted by members of the girl's family who informed him she was only 15. The girl's parents contacted Evans to ask about her whereabouts, and Evans told the parents she was no longer living with him and that he didn't know where she was, although she was residing in his apartment.
Over the course of the next several weeks and up until Evans's arrest on Sept. 22, 2015, he continued to sexually abuse the girl, prosecutors said.
In announcing the sentence, U.S. Attorney Phillips, Assistant Director in Charge Vale and Chief Newsham commended the work of those who investigated the case from MPD’s Youth Division and the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force.
Kansas man gets 2 life sentences in
child sex abuse case
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) - A Kansas man has been ordered to spend at least 50 years in prison for sexually attacking two 7-year-old children in 2013.
Forty-five-year-old Eric Landeo was sentenced Wednesday in Johnson County to two life sentences on two convictions of rape of a child and of aggravated indecent liberties of a child.
Landeo must serve at least 25 years on each life sentence, and a judge ordered him to serve each sentence one after the other.
Landeo was convicted in May of the sexual attacks that authorities say happened while he had been living with friends who had children. He was arrested in July 2013.
Child sex-abuse suspect sought by police for May 1 incident in Durham
BY MARK DONOVAN
Durham police are seeking the public’s help in tracking down for a Durham child sex-abuse suspect from Albemarle.
Police spokeswoman Kammie Michael said investigators are seeking John William Garris, 44, a traveling private music instructor, who is wanted on charges of first-degree statutory sexual offense and taking indecent liberties with a child.
The alleged incident was reported May 1 in Durham. The victim was known to Garris, according to investigators.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Garris is asked to call Investigator Mussatti at 919-560-4440, ext. 29349 or CrimeStoppers at 919-683-1200.
CrimeStoppers pays cash rewards for information leading to arrests in felony cases and callers do not have to identify themselves.
Another California doctor suspected of
child sex abuse
REDDING, Calif. (AP) — A Northern California doctor has been arrested on suspicion of sexual abusing eight minors, some of whom were his patients.
Redding police say they searched Shettell's office, home and a storage unit, and found child pornography.
He is one of the owners of Fusion Health Care and Silhouette Medspa in Redding, a city of about 90,000 people about 150 miles north of Sacramento.
His arrest comes after another California doctor, a brain surgeon from Santa Cruz, was arrested on similar suspicions. Dr. James Kohut has been charged with 11 counts of sexually abusing children under the age of 14.
Sixteen Alberta men facing child porn charges
Police have identified nearly 7,000 child pornography images
in relation to this case
By: Lucie Edwardson Metro
Tears welled in the eyes of a Calgary police officer Thursday as he spoke with media about the sexual abuse of children his team witnessed during a three-month operation that led to the arrest of 16 Alberta men.
The investigation, dubbed Operation Icebreaker, began in April 2017 and targeted suspects accessing child pornography in southern Alberta. In addition to the 16 arrests, the investigation also led to the identification of two underage luring victims.
The men charged in this case are from Red Deer, Airdrie, Calgary and Strathmore.
Operation Icebreaker resulted in 25 search warrants being executed between April and June. More than 500 computers and other electronic devices were seized and forensic analysts are currently in the process of reviewing the large volume of data.
To date, nearly 7,000 photos and videos containing child pornography have been identified with some of the victims as young as infants.
Det. Sean Spence became emotional when he told reporters about the graphic nature of some of the images discovered during Operation Icebreaker.
“The images to range from infants in diapers anywhere up to the age of 17,” he said. “These images can be simply a child being touched in an inappropriate matter all the way up to graphic sexual abuse.”
He said in one circumstance in another investigation, an individual was in possession of a known video where two children were “brutally sexually assaulted and murdered.”
In total, 16 suspects were arrested, ranging in age from 16 to 47 year old, 56 charges were laid, two victims were identified, 510 exhibits were seized, more than 19 million images were examined and 6,800 child pornography images were identified.
Further, over three months, Operation Icebreaker seized 28 terabytes of data from suspects in southern Alberta, which is roughly 7 billion double-sided printed sheets of paper. If stacked in a single pile, they would reach 450 km high.
The 16 people accused are facing a total of 56 child pornography related charges:
Adam Adler, 39, of Calgary
Marvin Agboro, 18, of Strathmore
Darian Blanchard, 21, of Red Deer
Brent Bulycz, 42, of Calgary
Curtis Brock, 27, of Airdrie
Yency Gomez, 38 of Calgary
Andrew Halliday, 28, of Red Deer
Ryland Jacklin, 28, of Airdrie
Kyle Jacobson, 32, of Calgary
Devin Lamont, 27, of Calgary
Mikael Macek, 25, of Calgary
Brandon McKnight, 23, of Calgary
Ole Olsen, 38, of Calgary
David Steele, 44, of Calgary
John Stewart, 47, of Calgary
16-year-old young offender from Calgary
Fairmont man charged with sexual abuse, assault
BY ALEX LANG
The Dominion Post
MORGANTOWN — A Fairmont man faces two felonies for sexually abusing and assaulting a child for years, according to an arrest report.
The Monongalia County Sheriff’s Department charged Carl W. Schritchfield with first-degree sexual assault and sexual abuse by a parent, guardian or person of trust. He was arraigned in Mon County Magistrate Court with bail set at $35,000.
According to his criminal complaint: In May, a sheriff’s detective attended an interview with an 11-year-old victim at the Mon County Child Advocacy Center.
The child said Schritchfield, a relative, abused her since she was 5 years old.
The victim said that Schritchfield forced her to perform sexual acts and have intercourse with him.
First-degree sexual assault, based on the victim’s age, is punishable by 15 to 35 years in prison. Sexual abuse by a parent, guardian or person in a position of trust can be punished by 10 to 20 years incarceration.
Man cleared in Wal-Mart bathroom pic case accused of producing child porn
BY SARAH CASSI
For lehighvalleylive.com
"If you are engaging in this type of behavior, you will be caught."
Those were the words a Lehigh County judge said to Jason Keith Keiser three years ago after the then Coplay, Pennsylvania man was found not guilty of invasion of privacy.
Keiser was accused of taking a cellphone photo of a 9-year-old boy using a urinal in the Wal-Mart off MacArthur Road in Whitehall Township. There was no picture found on Keiser's phone, however, and without that evidence Judge Kelly Banach acquitted him in the case.
The judge's hunch, according to Pennsylvania State Police, proved to be true.
Keiser is now accused of producing child pornography and trading it for other child pornography. He was arrested in May and is being held in Carbon County in lieu of $500,000 bail in the case.
Defense attorney Glenn Goodge declined to comment about the allegations ahead of Keiser's preliminary hearing, currently scheduled for Tuesday. A message left with the Carbon County District Attorney's office was not immediately returned.
Pennsylvania State Police said they received tips in February about child pornography being uploaded to Yahoo email accounts and a Flickr account with the same IP address. One image was focused on the genitals of a naked infant girl, state police said.
Troopers said they discovered the accounts had additional images of child pornography, as well as requests to trade child pornography. Troopers said they traced the IP information to Keiser's home in the 200 block of South Second Street in Lehighton in Carbon County.
Keiser's home was raided on May 25, and troopers seized two devices.
Investigators found "thousands" of pictures and videos of child pornography, depicting children from infants to toddlers, some of which included "graphic" sexual abuse of children, according to state police.
In an interview with troopers, the 25-year-old Keiser reportedly admitted to downloading, possessing and trading child pornography. During a polygraph test, however, Keiser allegedly showed signs of being deceptive when asked if he took inappropriate naked pictures of children.
In a second interview with investigators, Keiser allegedly admitted taking pictures of a nude child and sending the pictures to people on social media to trade more child pornography.
In the Lehigh County case, the boy's father testified that in November 2013 he was washing his hands in the Wal-Mart bathroom while his son was still at the urinal.
The dad heard the distinctive click of an iPhone camera, looked in the corner of the bathroom mirror and saw a hand and cellphone over the wall of a stall aimed at his son at the urinal.
Judge rules not guilty Wal-Mart bathroom photo case
The man grabbed his son, took him out of the bathroom and went to report the incident to store employees.
Eventually township police were called and they reviewed store video footage, which showed Keiser entering the bathroom behind the man and his son, and leaving after the pair left the bathroom.
A forensic expert testified at the June 2015 non-jury trial for Keiser that he was unable to find any evidence of a photo taken that day on Keiser's iPhone.
Without the photo, the judge said she could not convict Keiser.
"If you are engaging in this type of behavior, you will be caught," Banach said when she rendered the verdict. "In my heart, even in my head, I think you were attempting to take a picture."
In the Carbon County case, Keiser is charged with two counts of photographing, filming or depicting on a computer a child engaging or simulating a sex act, as well as disseminating child pornography, possessing or viewing child pornography, unlawful contact with a minor, selling obscene or sexual materials, and criminal use of a communication facility.
Sex offender’s wife accused of failing to report
new abuse allegation
BY DEANNA BOYD
FORT WORTH, TX
The wife of a registered sex offender has been jailed, accused of failing to report her husband’s alleged sexual abuse of an 11-year-old relative and instead instructing the girl not to tell anyone.
Debra Delafuente was arrested Tuesday on a warrant accusing her of failing to report child abuse.
The Texas Family Code mandates that anyone who suspects child abuse or neglect must report it immediately to law enforcement or the Department of Family and Protective Services.
FAILING TO REPORT CHILD ABUSE IS A CLASS A MISDEMEANOR
PUNISHABLE BY UP TO A YEAR IN JAIL AND A $4,000 FINE.
Delafuente’s husband, 56-year-old Oscar Delafuente, was arrested in May and indicted June 23 on a charge of indecency with a child/fondling. He remains in the Tarrant County Jail with bail set at $25,000.
Oscar Delafuente previously was charged, in June 2004, with aggravated sexual assault of a child by threat. Texas Department of Public Safety records indicate the victim in that case was a 3-year-old girl.
He pleaded guilty to indecency-fondling in July 2005 and was sentenced to deferred adjudication probation. His probation was revoked in July 2008, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In the latest case, the 11-year-old girl’s mother called police in late April, reporting that her daughter said that she had been “touched on her private parts” by Oscar Delafuente, a relative, while visiting his Fort Worth home.
In a subsequent interview with a forensic interviewer, the girl said the touching had occurred while spending the night at the Delafuentes’ home sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving.
THE VICTIM RELATED THAT SHE FROZE FOR A COUPLE OF MINUTES
BECAUSE SHE COULDN’T BELIEVE SOMEBODY SHE LOVED WOULD
DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT TO HER.
Fort Worth police Detective W.K. Maddox
She said she had been sleeping between the couple when she awoke to find Oscar Delafuente touching her.
“The victim related that she froze for a couple of minutes because she couldn’t believe somebody she loved would do something like that to her,” Crimes Against Children Detective W.K. Maddox wrote in arrest warrant affidavits for the couple.
The girl said she rolled over to let Oscar Delafuente know that she was awake and that he stopped touching her.
The next morning, the girl told Debra Delafuente what had happened, but the woman “told her not to tell anyone,” the affidavit states.
The girl’s mother told police that her daughter had spent almost every other weekend at the Delfuentes’ house but suddenly became very reluctant to go there. She said she repeatedly questioned her daughter about what was wrong and her daughter eventually confided in her about being touched.
The girl also told her mother that she had told Debra Delafuente about the touching but that the woman had told her that “Oscar probably just thought the victim was Debra and instructed the victim not to tell anyone about it,” the affidavit states.
The mother told police that she called Debra Delafuente to confront her about not doing anything regarding her daughter’s outcry. She told police that Debra Delafuente responded, “I don’t know what to tell you. It won’t happen again.’ ”
The mother told police that she hasn’t let her daughter see the Delafuentes since the outcry.
In a June 5 interview with Maddox, Debra Delafuente denied that the girl ever told her about being touched by Oscar Delafuente. She said the girl had once told her that Oscar Delafuente had “made her uncomfortable” and that she had advised the girl to stay away from him.
Maddox wrote that the 11-year-old girl’s account of what happened has been consistent throughout the investigation and “her credibility is unquestioned.”
Debra Delafuente remained in the Mansfield jail Thursday with bail set at $2,500.
Man Faces Up To 130 Years In Jail For Sexual Abuse
by Michael Doherty
A North Carolina man faces up to 130 years of jail time after he was convicted of sexually abusing a 6-year-old girl.
Allen Jamison, 53, was sentenced to between 79 and 130 years in prison for three counts of sexual offense and a host of other charges, reports the Greensboro News & Record.
Jamison allegedly began to abuse the girl in January 2012, while dating the girl's mother, according to Guilford County Chief Assistant District Attorney Howard Neumann.
Neumann said that Jamison "forced her to perform sexual acts on him on more than one occasion."
Neumann added that even after the girl told her mother what Jamison had done, she kept dating him and left her alone with the man. The mother has been convicted for her role in the abuse, though she has not yet received a sentence.
The mother has reportedly agreed to testify against Jamison as part of a plea deal.
The young girl has been moved into her father's custody in a different state.
Missouri man sentenced to life for sex crimes on 10 y/o girl
In June, a Missouri man was sentenced to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to sex crimes against a 10-year-old girl, News-Press Now reports.
Shannon Langley, 35, was given a life sentence for first-degree statutory sodomy and enticement of a child. According to prosecutors, Langley had also abused other children.
The assault allegedly occurred in August 2015. Langley confessed that he had tried to kiss the victim before assaulting her after he said he had to "check her for bugs," the Kansas City Star reports.
Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd said that after Langley assaulted the victim, she sent a Facebook message to her mother, causing the mom to suspect something was wrong. After the mom came home, the young girl told her about what had happened.
Langley still has two pending cases in Jackson County involving sex crimes.
While sex offenders do not often receive life sentences, a provision in Missouri law can be used to sentence sex offenders who repeatedly commit serious crimes.
"We used every tool the law gives us to make sure this defendant has molested his last child," said Zahnd. "His days of hurting kids are finally over."
According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 1 in 9 girls under the age of 18 face sexual assault from an adult, as well as 1 in 53 boys under 18. RAINN reports that 93 percent of child victims know their abusers -- they are often parents or relatives, or the partner of a parent.
These are very conservative numbers which do not include pier-on-pier sex abuse, only those committed by adults. They told me that if they included pier-on-pier statistics that they would go 'way up'!
RAINN also, I believe, does not include child brides and female genital mutilation as forms of child sex abuse.
Child Protective Services finds evidence of a case of child sex abuse every eight minutes, with a reported 63,000 victims each year, according to RAINN.
Of course, those are the ones they know about and make up a small percentage of the actual child sex abuses.
Platte Co., Missouri
Former nanny, school volunteer faces
child molestation charges
David Shwenke Tupou was first accused in 1994,
but his three victims have come forward now
by Sue Dremann / Palo Alto Weekly
A woman the Weekly interviewed in 2014 said she used to play at a friend's house near Bol Park while under the supervision of David Schwenke Tupou. Weekly file photo.
A former Palo Alto elementary school volunteer and nanny who was initially accused of child molestation 23 years ago has now been charged with two counts of felony lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 in that case, a Santa Clara County prosecutor said.
The 1994 case against David Shwenke Tupou (aka David Tupou Schwenke), who was then 36 years old, divided the Palo Alto school community: some people wanted him prosecuted and others demanded the charges be dropped against the charismatic school volunteer.
But three alleged victims from that case -- sisters in whose home Tupou lived as a nanny -- came forward again last November to press charges. After investigations by Palo Alto police and the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, prosecutors filed charges against Tupou in February for acts against one of the sisters.
Tupou (pronounced Too-BOH) is already serving a 67-year prison sentence for sexual-assault convictions in a 1998-1999 case involving a San Jose girl. He has been imprisoned since 2001 at the California Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, according to online prison records.
The three sisters in the Palo Alto case, now adults in their late 20s and 30s, told police they came forward again because they are concerned that since Proposition 57 passed in California, Tupou might be released from prison early and they don't want him to harm on anyone else. In addition, one of the sisters, designated as Victim 1 in the November police report, said she is now a parent and wanted to make sure she did the right thing.
Last fall, the San Jose sex-abuse survivor contacted one of the sisters through Facebook and reportedly told her Tupou referred to the three Palo Alto victims by their names while she was being abused.
The alleged abuse in Palo Alto took place from 1991 to 1995 when the girls were between the ages of 4 and 12 years old. Victim 1 was allegedly abused between ages 4 and 8; Victim 2 was 6 to 10 years old and Victim 3 was 8 to 12 years old, according to the police report.
Tupou allegedly used "force or fear," coercion and threats to get the girls to cooperate, including hanging their baby brother out of a window and threatening to drop him if they did not cooperate. The girls thought it was "a small price to pay" to keep their brother from being dropped off the balcony, they told police.
The alleged abuse included kissing, photographing them naked, having them watch provocative videos, playing "strip poker"-type games and touching their bodies or having them touch his, according to the police report. A witness who was friends with Victim 1 has also corroborated parts of what the sisters described, according to the police report.
Tupou had a considerable history in Palo Alto schools. He worked for the Palo Alto Unified School District in 1991-1992 as a language tutor, according to previous Weekly news reports. He volunteered in at least five Palo Alto schools in 1993-1994 including Hoover, Juana Briones, El Carmelo, Addison and Walter Hays elementary schools, mostly in kindergarten classes. He also volunteered at the Palo Alto Children's Theatre.
Principals at Hoover and El Carmelo asked Tupou to discontinue volunteering after multiple parents expressed concern over his too-intimate behavior with their children, which included excessive tickling, according to Weekly news reports at the time.
In fall 1994 a parent reported to police that Victim 1 told her daughter how she had been sexually abused by Tupou. He was then arrested and charged on Oct. 19, 1994, with two counts of child molestation. The charges were reduced to annoying a child after the three sisters would not testify against him. Tupou was required to take sensitivity training and the charges were dropped, according to court documents and news reports.
One of the sisters did give police a detailed account of Tupou's alleged sexual touching, according to the 1994 police report. But the children were allegedly instructed by their mother to later lie so there would not be any consequence to Tupou because he was "family," they told police in November.
The reasons why their mother allegedly protected Tupou are not discussed in the police narrative. But Victims 1 and 3 said their mother made it clear -- at one point during a kitchen-table meeting with Tupou present -- that it was not something they should talk about, according to the police report. The mother allegedly told the children that the account Victim 1 had given to police was "mistaken."
The sisters now say they were not given a fair chance in the 1990s to prosecute Tupou because they were minors who were instructed by a parent to lie to police, they said in the 2016 police report.
They could still get their day in court. California does have statutes of limitation on sexual-abuse cases, but there are exceptions that can extend the statute by a year from the time the victim reports the crime, Deputy District Attorney Pinaki Chakravorty said. Adults who report a substantial sexual assault that occurred when they were children can still see charges filed against their alleged abusers many years later.
Tupou was booked into the Santa Clara County Main Jail on April 4 where he will remain while his case proceeds. He is being held without bail. He has pleaded not guilty, Chakravorty said. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on the charges on Sept. 25 in Santa Clara County Superior Court in Palo Alto. He is currently considering hiring a private attorney, according to court documents.
Upon resolution of his case, whether he is convicted or not, he will be returned to state prison to continue serving his sentence for the conviction in the San Jose case, according to court documents.
Children's hospital employee faces child sex abuse charge in Lexington
By WKYT News Staff
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Police charged a 45-year-old Lexington woman with rape. Officers booked Heather Jean Seltsam into the Fayette County Detention Center on Wednesday afternoon. She's due in court on Thursday to answer to charges of 3rd-degree rape, 2nd-degree sexual abuse and prohibited use of electronic communication.
Investigators say Seltsam had sex with a minor who is under the age of 16 and exchanged pictures with the child that were of a sexual nature.
Officials at Kentucky Children's Hospital confirmed to WKYT that Seltsam has worked at the hospital since 1995. They say she is currently on administrative leave. Lexington Police say the suspect did not come in contact with the victim through her job.
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