Sex offender says he baby-sat

Detectives got conflicting information when they attempted to determine if a suspended Spokane police officer or his wife ever left their three children alone with a registered sex offender living in the family’s home, newly released police records show.

Cpl. David Freitag has been on paid administrative leave since July 25, when Thomas A. Herman was arrested by FBI agents on federal child pornography charges.

Herman is accused in a federal indictment of using his computer and the Internet, while living in the police officer’s home, to trade and download thousands of pictures of children being raped.

The 65-year-old sex offender is scheduled to stand trial Dec. 4 in U.S. District Court in Spokane. A pretrial conference is scheduled Monday afternoon before Judge Fred Van Sickle.

After his arrest, Herman reportedly told FBI agents that he frequently baby-sat Freitag’s children.

The Freitags each have a teenage son from prior marriages and are the parents of a 6-year-old daughter.

When their daughter was questioned by a specially trained child counselor, she “nodded her head yes” after being asked if Herman had ever taken care of her while her parents or older brothers were gone from the home, according to the detectives’ reports.

“She told (the counselor) that Herman would watch her sometimes when her mom went to the liquor store or to the Smoke Shop,” the reports say.

The child told the counselor she never played any games on Herman’s computer and that he called it his “secret computer.”

The girl didn’t suggest she was inappropriately touched by Herman, the reports say.

When Freitag and his wife were separately interviewed by the same detectives, they denied ever leaving their young daughter or teenage sons alone with the registered sex offender, the newly released investigative reports say.

The police documents, obtained under the Washington State Open Records Act, reveal that Freitag agreed to talk with detectives from his department after hiring attorney Carl Oreskovich.

Freitag said he and his wife agreed to allow Herman to move into the basement of their home after a tax foreclosure forced Herman out of his late mother’s house where he had lived, the reports said. Both Freitag and his wife told investigators they knew Herman was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of raping girls in the mid-1980s.

The police officer and his wife “set no specific date for Herman to move out, but they told him several times that this was a short-term resolution to his (financial) problem,” the reports say.

The police officer said “that at no time has he had anything to do with child pornography or anything that Herman has been doing on the computer,” Detective Mark Burbridge wrote after interviewing Freitag.

“When asked if Herman was ever left in charge of the kids, Freitag’s answer was ‘no,’ ” the report said. But later, when asked if his wife may have left the children with Herman while Freitag was at work, the officer responded, ‘To the best of my knowledge, no, but I’m not sure,’ ” the report said.

Herman was one of 22 suspects arrested in 20 states in July after allegedly posting encrypted pornographic pictures of children at a Web site operated by the “North American Man/Girl Love Association.”

Herman became one of the community’s first officially registered sex offenders after he was released from prison following 1986 convictions on five counts of exploitation of a child, two counts of statutory rape and one count of indecent liberties.

The investigation leading to those charges revealed Herman was taking pictures of young girls, some of whom he raped.

Freitag is not charged with any crime but became the focus of a criminal investigation by his own department in early August following Herman’s arrest.

Those detective reports, forwarded to the prosecutor’s office, say Freitag and Herman have been friends for several years.

The police officer took firearms as collateral from Herman after loaning him $1,200, the records say.

The reports don’t point to any possible state crime that Freitag may have committed, and he hasn’t been charged with violating any state law by the county prosecutor’s office.

But his conduct now apparently is the focus of a separate internal affairs investigation. The question of any punishment for Freitag, including his possible termination from the department where he’s worked for 15 years, ultimately will rest with Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick.