Detective Ron Bridge with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office recently participated in three arrests of men charged with Internet crimes against children.
At least one is a Summit County resident. Christopher Molineux, 19, was arrested March 24 for allegedly possessing child pornography on a computer.
Roger Cederholm, 22, is a Salt Lake City resident who allegedly sent Bridge images and video of pornography believing he was corresponding with 13-year-old girl.
Bridge posed as a child online and the suspect sought him out to chat.
“I’ve gone through extensive training; the conversation is led by them,” Bridge said. “This was material he had located on the Internet and wanted to share.”
The third person cannot be identified in any way because the suspect was arrested and will be prosecuted at a federal level by the U.S. Attorney General’s office.
“The federal process is much more serious,” Bridge said. “The way they do stuff is completely different.”
No digitally-created images were used as evidence, he said, only images or videos of live human beings who are victims of a crime.
The three were part of a state-wide operation in which 39 people were arrested in the month of March. The law enforcement task force, of which Bridge has been a member for two years, is federally funded. The force titled the March initiative Operation FrostyLime Squeeze because they were “putting the squeeze” to peer-to-peer file sharing programs.
Bridge said operations like this are done annually or more frequently. Most suspects are men although a few females are currently under investigation. It is difficult to estimate how widespread these crimes are, he said.
“We could spend hundreds of millions on these arrests, and there will still be people needing to be investigated and arrested for these crimes,” Bridge said.
There is no way to profile a potential child-sex offender.
“There is no commonality among suspects that violate children. They come from all walks of life, all careers they come from everywhere,” he said.
Bridge said investigators who handle these crimes have to deal with the material every day.
“It takes a toll on them. Not every kind of police and law enforcement officer can do this kind of work,” he added.
As a warning to the public, Bridge said it is becoming common for perpetrators to download images with smart phones using other people’s wireless access. Wireless customers should use password security features and not divulge the key words to anyone.