Omak man gets 20 years for child porn

An Omak, Wash., maintenance man who videotaped himself raping four young girls and putting the encounters on the Internet was sentenced Monday in Spokane to spend the next 20 years in federal prison.

“I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but this really is a terrible case,” Senior U.S. District Court Judge Frem Nielsen said before sentencing Scott Dean Brown to prison.

The 34-year-old defendant engaged in sexual “physical contact of every type and of every nature” with the young girls, who will live “with profound effects the rest of their lives,” the judge said.

The abuse of Brown’s initial victim lasted for five or six years, Nielsen said in reviewing a pre-sentence report detailing the molester’s history.

When images of the first victim were sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, investigators there determined Brown had videotaped himself sexually abusing or raping three other young girls, one who was 3 years old.

“We initially didn’t realize he had been molesting these other victims,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Lister.

Once the center’s “Child Victimization Identification Program” identified Brown as a suspect in other child porn circulating on the Internet, federal investigators located the three additional victims and their parents, all living in Okanogan County, and questioned the suspect, confirming those suspicions.

“No one knew they had been victimized until the National Center came forward with this additional information,” Lister said, commending the work of the child-victim advocacy organization.

Identification of the additional victims convinced the U.S. attorney’s office that it would settle for nothing less than a 20-year sentence, Lister said.

Brown, 34, pleaded guilty in June to one count of transportation of child pornography under a plea agreement that involved the U.S. attorney’s office seeking the dismissal of three other counts charging him with production and possession of child porn.

Under terms of the plea agreement, Brown and his attorney, Bevan Maxey, agreed with Lister in recommending the 20-year sentence to the court.

Upon his release from prison, Brown will be required to register as a sex offender wherever he lives and will be on federal parole for the remainder of his life, living under a list of strict “supervised release” conditions.

“I don’t disagree with the 20 years and life of supervised release,” Brown told the court.

“I did some pretty horrible things I’m not proud of,” he said.

“The agreed-upon sentence of 20 years is a long sentence, but it is not too long,” the judge told Brown.

Nielsen agreed to Brown’s request to be sent to a federal sex offender program and alcohol substance abuse treatment.

The federal prosecutor said the case began in January 2006 when Okanogan County sheriff’s deputies served a search warrant at a home where Brown was living near Omak.

Deputies seized a hard drive and related computer equipment, which they later turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for forensic evaluation. Those exams revealed 300 to 400 images of child pornography, according to court documents.

When federal ICE agents went to Omak to arrest Brown on May 1, 2006, they found he had a new computer in a house where he was living with his parents. Agents returned the following day with another search warrant and seized several computers from the home. No additional child porn was found on those other computers, Lister said.

Ultimately agents determined Brown was in possession of as many as 600 child porn images, court documents say.

Brown admitted producing child pornography himself using a digital camera, a webcam connected to his personal computer and a “spy camera” installed in a clock radio, court documents say.