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Here‘s a good example of some guys with the right attitude, who didn‘t say "FIDO", or "it‘s not my responsibility ...". I‘d say it‘s pretty darn close to "above and beyond the call of duty", but then again I‘m a softie when it comes to kids.
Bravo Zulu! I‘m proud there are still some good cops left in Toronto.
Canadian Web sleuths save U.S. girl in porn case
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Globe and Mail Update
TORONTO â †In the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina is a little girl who owes her life -- perhaps literally -- to seven Toronto police officers.
They are members of the child exploitation branch of the force‘s sex crimes unit, and last December, they managed to extract information enough from a collection of searing child-porn images posted on an international police website to identify the six-year-old‘s school.
By zeroing in on a wristband the child wore in some of the pictures, a badge on her girl scout uniform and a deliberately blurred-out logo on a T-shirt she wore under a school jumper, the Toronto squad was able to narrow the search first to the Raleigh-Durham area, and ultimately, by cross-checking with school uniform manufacturers in the area, to direct officers from the local Federal Bureau of Investigation office to the right address.
This week, in Raleigh, acting United States Attorney George Holding announced that Brian Tod Schellenberger, 41, of Cary, N.C., has been indicted by a grand jury.
He faces four counts of child exploitation and one of possession of child pornography in connection with his alleged coercion into the child-porn business of not one, but two, underage children.
The second minor is a three-month-old boy, The Globe and Mail has learned.
Mr. Schellenberger is to appear in district court next Monday for arraignment.
Behind the simple U.S. Attorney‘s bare-bones press release crediting the Toronto force is a story of traditional police work applied to cutting-edge Internet detection and a rare success that saw grown men and women in the small office headed by Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie office break down in tears.
As well, Det. Sgt. Gillespie said, U.S. authorities are also pursuing reports that Mr. Schellenberger may have tried to hire someone to kill the little girl and her mother, who was apparently unaware of the abuse.
In addition, because of material allegedly seized from Mr. Schellenberger‘s computer, the FBI has since moved in on a different woman in Dallas, Tex., who was allegedly "renting" out one of her three children to worldwide customers who would fly in from as far away as England to have sex with the child.
All the youngsters involved are now with child protection authorities.
It was on Tuesday, Dec. 2, that Det. Sgt. Gillespie‘s unit -- Det. Ian Lamond and Detective Constables Bill McGarry, Kris McCarthy, John Menard, Paul Krawczyck and Steffan Mueller -- made the final breakthrough and were able to identify the logo on the little girl‘s T-shirt.
"We‘d been working with the FBI, but now we said, ‘Go to this school,‘ " Det. Sgt. Gillespie said. The pornographer had blurred out all but a millimetre of the school logo, he said, but when "we superimposed it on the millimetre, it was a perfect match. We couldn‘t believe it."
Identifying actual child victims of the enormous and fast-growing Net pornography business is rare: Fewer than 300 children have been identified worldwide from the estimated pool of between 50,000 and 100,000 victims. As Det. Sgt. Gillespie put it last night, "We suck at identifying kids."
The Toronto unit kept in constant touch with the FBI, and got bulletins that "Okay, they‘re leaving for the school now; they‘re five minutes away." When they arrived, and showed the picture of the little girl Det. Sgt. Gillespie calls "our victim," the principal said, "Oh yeah, she‘s a student here."
When the Toronto officers got that call, and the news that the little girl had been saved, "It was the best Christmas present ever," Det. Sgt. Gillespie said last night. "I mean, we knew we had the right school, but we really couldn‘t believe it. Two or three of my people broke down." He began to choke up himself as he spoke. "I‘ve given a couple of presentations to select groups of officers about this case," he said, "and I‘ve yet to be able to get through it without breaking down myself."
The remarkable story got its start on Sunday, Nov. 30, when Det. Sgt. Gillespie came to work at 5 that morning to prepare for promotional exams he was to write later that day. As usual, he checked in with the "workspace" his office shares on the Web with top child-porn experts from 15 international police forces, each of which posts the newest images they seize in their arrests. There, he found a new collection of 450 of the worst images he says he‘s ever seen, and which the FBI has since classified as one of the most degrading it has seized, both in size and in content (Mr. Schellenberger allegedly had several hundred thousand child porn images on his computer when arrested).
He allegedly belonged to a super-secret small group of pornographers who produce and view what has come to be called "hurt-core porn" because the images involve children under the age of 13 who are being physically battered.
Det. Sgt. Gillespie‘s rescued little girl, for example, was seen being beaten, urinated and defecated on, sodomized, forced into oral sex, degraded by having such slogans as "Kill me I‘m a slut" written on her body and kept in a dog cage.
"It was the dog cage that really got me," Det. Sgt. Gillespie told The Globe. "She was obviously in pain, those poor brown eyes looking up at you."
He ordered his squad to drop everything else the next day, and the team spent the next 36 hours working on narrowing down the search for retrievable clues on the images.
"It was such a motivator," he said last night. "We all thought, maybe we are making a difference: We saved a little girl‘s life in North Carolina. Somebody upstairs was directing us. Maybe when she‘s the president of the United States, we‘ll know why we were able to rescue her."
Det. Sgt. Gillespie said he wants to meet his little brown-eyed girl -- who is, he‘s been told by the FBI, "very intelligent and very nice" -- one day. "I have to see her personally," he said. "I‘ve got to go down there."
cblatchford@globeandmail.ca
Bravo Zulu! I‘m proud there are still some good cops left in Toronto.
Canadian Web sleuths save U.S. girl in porn case
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Globe and Mail Update
TORONTO â †In the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina is a little girl who owes her life -- perhaps literally -- to seven Toronto police officers.
They are members of the child exploitation branch of the force‘s sex crimes unit, and last December, they managed to extract information enough from a collection of searing child-porn images posted on an international police website to identify the six-year-old‘s school.
By zeroing in on a wristband the child wore in some of the pictures, a badge on her girl scout uniform and a deliberately blurred-out logo on a T-shirt she wore under a school jumper, the Toronto squad was able to narrow the search first to the Raleigh-Durham area, and ultimately, by cross-checking with school uniform manufacturers in the area, to direct officers from the local Federal Bureau of Investigation office to the right address.
This week, in Raleigh, acting United States Attorney George Holding announced that Brian Tod Schellenberger, 41, of Cary, N.C., has been indicted by a grand jury.
He faces four counts of child exploitation and one of possession of child pornography in connection with his alleged coercion into the child-porn business of not one, but two, underage children.
The second minor is a three-month-old boy, The Globe and Mail has learned.
Mr. Schellenberger is to appear in district court next Monday for arraignment.
Behind the simple U.S. Attorney‘s bare-bones press release crediting the Toronto force is a story of traditional police work applied to cutting-edge Internet detection and a rare success that saw grown men and women in the small office headed by Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie office break down in tears.
As well, Det. Sgt. Gillespie said, U.S. authorities are also pursuing reports that Mr. Schellenberger may have tried to hire someone to kill the little girl and her mother, who was apparently unaware of the abuse.
In addition, because of material allegedly seized from Mr. Schellenberger‘s computer, the FBI has since moved in on a different woman in Dallas, Tex., who was allegedly "renting" out one of her three children to worldwide customers who would fly in from as far away as England to have sex with the child.
All the youngsters involved are now with child protection authorities.
It was on Tuesday, Dec. 2, that Det. Sgt. Gillespie‘s unit -- Det. Ian Lamond and Detective Constables Bill McGarry, Kris McCarthy, John Menard, Paul Krawczyck and Steffan Mueller -- made the final breakthrough and were able to identify the logo on the little girl‘s T-shirt.
"We‘d been working with the FBI, but now we said, ‘Go to this school,‘ " Det. Sgt. Gillespie said. The pornographer had blurred out all but a millimetre of the school logo, he said, but when "we superimposed it on the millimetre, it was a perfect match. We couldn‘t believe it."
Identifying actual child victims of the enormous and fast-growing Net pornography business is rare: Fewer than 300 children have been identified worldwide from the estimated pool of between 50,000 and 100,000 victims. As Det. Sgt. Gillespie put it last night, "We suck at identifying kids."
The Toronto unit kept in constant touch with the FBI, and got bulletins that "Okay, they‘re leaving for the school now; they‘re five minutes away." When they arrived, and showed the picture of the little girl Det. Sgt. Gillespie calls "our victim," the principal said, "Oh yeah, she‘s a student here."
When the Toronto officers got that call, and the news that the little girl had been saved, "It was the best Christmas present ever," Det. Sgt. Gillespie said last night. "I mean, we knew we had the right school, but we really couldn‘t believe it. Two or three of my people broke down." He began to choke up himself as he spoke. "I‘ve given a couple of presentations to select groups of officers about this case," he said, "and I‘ve yet to be able to get through it without breaking down myself."
The remarkable story got its start on Sunday, Nov. 30, when Det. Sgt. Gillespie came to work at 5 that morning to prepare for promotional exams he was to write later that day. As usual, he checked in with the "workspace" his office shares on the Web with top child-porn experts from 15 international police forces, each of which posts the newest images they seize in their arrests. There, he found a new collection of 450 of the worst images he says he‘s ever seen, and which the FBI has since classified as one of the most degrading it has seized, both in size and in content (Mr. Schellenberger allegedly had several hundred thousand child porn images on his computer when arrested).
He allegedly belonged to a super-secret small group of pornographers who produce and view what has come to be called "hurt-core porn" because the images involve children under the age of 13 who are being physically battered.
Det. Sgt. Gillespie‘s rescued little girl, for example, was seen being beaten, urinated and defecated on, sodomized, forced into oral sex, degraded by having such slogans as "Kill me I‘m a slut" written on her body and kept in a dog cage.
"It was the dog cage that really got me," Det. Sgt. Gillespie told The Globe. "She was obviously in pain, those poor brown eyes looking up at you."
He ordered his squad to drop everything else the next day, and the team spent the next 36 hours working on narrowing down the search for retrievable clues on the images.
"It was such a motivator," he said last night. "We all thought, maybe we are making a difference: We saved a little girl‘s life in North Carolina. Somebody upstairs was directing us. Maybe when she‘s the president of the United States, we‘ll know why we were able to rescue her."
Det. Sgt. Gillespie said he wants to meet his little brown-eyed girl -- who is, he‘s been told by the FBI, "very intelligent and very nice" -- one day. "I have to see her personally," he said. "I‘ve got to go down there."
cblatchford@globeandmail.ca
