A southern Manitoba man’s alleged sexual abuse of his pre-teen daughter raised alarms as far away as Hawaii and France and had police in a race against time to save her from further harm, search warrant documents obtained by the Free Press reveal.
The 31-year-old man — who can’t be named to protect the identity of his daughter — was arrested in November and charged with sexual assault, luring and multiple child pornography offences spanning four years. The Free Press is not identifying the man’s community to further protect his daughter’s identity.
The man’s arrest came a month after Manitoba RCMP were alerted to an unidentified online predator from a southern Manitoba community who had been unwittingly communicating with an undercover FBI officer in Washington.
According to an FBI report cited in search warrant documents, the undercover officer joined a chat group last August known for its dissemination of child sexual abuse material and made contact with a man who identified himself as “Todd.” The two moved to a private chat, where Todd sent the officer several sex abuse images of a girl he identified as his daughter.
Todd went on to tell the officer how to groom his own daughter.
“Todd stated that he has a wife at home and he works in ‘management,’” search warrant documents say. “Todd says that he started grooming his daughter when she was five and wishes he had started sooner. He added that his daughter knows what he is doing is illegal and that he really wants to help the (undercover officer) progress with his daughter.”
Todd sent the officer a FaceTime video of the girl saying hi. Only the lower portion of the girl’s face is visible on the video; Todd is not visible on the video, but can be heard asking the girl questions for the undercover officer’s benefit.
After asking the girl to say how old she is, “Todd asks her to show her missing teeth to prove she is still a kid,” the documents say.
Todd, who did not have custody of the girl, told the undercover officer he would be picking his daughter up after work on Aug. 18 and planned to sexually abuse her when his wife was out of the house.
Todd later told the officer he was no longer seeing the girl that weekend and subsequently blocked the officer from contacting him.
In September, an undercover FBI officer in Hawaii posing as a nine-year-old girl made contact in the same chat group with a man police believe to be Todd.
“He continuously asked the nine-year-old for pictures of herself, and she responded that she needed to ask her dad,” say search warrant documents.
Investigation by police on both sides of the border identified an IP address in a southern Manitoba community as the source of the illegal communications.
On Oct. 17, RCMP Const. Gord Olson contacted Bell MTS for the subscriber information associated with the IP address.
“I explained to them the nature of our investigation, highlighting the fact an unknown female child was being exploited and believed to be the victim of ongoing sexual abuse by ‘Todd,’” Olson wrote in the documents.
The subscriber information led RCMP to a farm implement dealership where on Nov. 2, Olson and another officer executed a search warrant and checked the electronic devices and email addresses of more than a dozen employees, but were no closer to identifying Todd.
On Nov. 6, Olson forwarded the FaceTime video Todd recorded to another officer to play for the manager of the dealership. The manager identified the man heard on the video as one of his employees.
After some further investigation, police arrested the accused two days later.
Two weeks later, police learned child abuse investigators in France were investigating the case of a Canadian man sharing sex abuse videos of his daughter with a French offender and needed help identifying the victim.
Olson reviewed the videos and identified the girl as the same victim in the Manitoba investigation. A male voice heard on the video was that of “Todd.”
“I learned that (the accused) had connected with a like-minded sex offender in France and was sharing his collection of abuse material … and was also counselling this offender in France on how to abuse his daughter,” Olson wrote.
The accused is free on bail. His next court date is June 6 in Brandon.
dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Dean Pritchard
Courts reporter
Someone once said a journalist is just a reporter in a good suit. Dean Pritchard doesn’t own a good suit. But he knows a good lawsuit.
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