The Child Protection eNewsletter

Middle School mom finds naked pictures of school mates on MySpace…

A Jacksonville Beach, Florida mother logging on to check her daughter's MySpace page was shocked when she found some racy photos of kids from a local middle school. Read More

Jacksonville Beach police said the mother went straight to the authorities with the pictures of nude kids, kids in their underwear and kids in swimsuits that she found on the Web page.

Most of the kids in the photos attend Fletcher Middle School, according to police. Police said the pictures are illegal because they consider the online photos a distribution of child pornography.

Officers said they hope to present the case to the state attorney and press charges.

In the meantime, police suggest that parents talk to their kids and take an active role in their lives and know with whom their children are hanging out. For more information about protecting kids on MySpace see eGuide Volume 1, Issue 2

Meanwhile, some Utah teens are in trouble after trading nude pictures of themselves with friends via cell phones. Read More

A parent of one of the kids found the pictures on their child's cell phone and called police. Detectives say the 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls questioned said they took the pictures as a joke, but it's potentially a crime. Read More

Police say they plan to turn the investigation over to the Davis County attorney by the end of the week to decide if charges will be filed.

Trial begins in Nixzmary Brown murder…

There had been warning signs for years before 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown died from a vicious blow to the head. Read More School employees had reported that she had been absent for weeks the previous year. Neighbors noticed unexplained injuries and noted the child appeared underfed and small for her age.

Child welfare workers had been alerted twice but said they found no conclusive evidence of abuse. Two years after the girl's death shocked New York City, hastened child welfare reforms and made her name synonymous with child abuse, opening statements began in her stepfather's murder trial.

A battered 7-year-old who was tied to a chair, forced to use a cat-litter box and punished by being held under cold water died in a "prison" of "systematic torture and abuse," a prosecutor said at the opening of her stepfather's murder trial. Read More "It was inevitable her life would end the way it did: battered and beaten, left alone on the floor, moaning until she could no longer hold onto life," Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh told jurors.

Dwimoh told jurors that Cesar Rodriguez, 29, beat his stepdaughter and dunked her in cold water after accusing her of stealing a cup of yogurt.

Before that, Nixzmary was confined to a room with dirty mattresses, a broken radiator, an old wooden school chair with a rope, and the litter box. The victim was "routinely tied to the chair. She was repeatedly beaten with a belt and fists - his fists," Dwimoh said, pointing to the defendant.

Rodriguez's lawyer, Jeffrey Schwartz, said it was the girl's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who killed her. She faces a separate trial later this year.

The case, coupled with a series of high-profile deaths of children known to child welfare workers, sparked public demands for reform. City officials and lawmakers responded by bolstering the corps of caseworkers and drafting legislation to give life in prison without parole to parents who cause the death of a child under 14 through abuse. (See Volume 4, Issue 3 and Volume 4, Issue 4.)

Authorities say evidence against Rodriguez includes photos of the victim and the family's three-bedroom apartment, as well as videotape of the defendant casting blame on the malnourished girl, who weighed 45 pounds at the time of her death. He faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.

In other news…

The federal government is asking a U.S. District Court in Vermont to order a man to type a password that would unlock files on his computer, despite his claim that doing so would constitute self-incrimination. Read More The case, believed to be the first of its kind to reach this level, raises a uniquely digital-age question about how to balance privacy and civil liberties against the government's responsibility to protect the public. The case, which involves suspected possession of child pornography, comes as more Americans turn to encryption to protect the privacy and security of files on their laptops and thumb drives. FBI and Justice Department officials, meanwhile, have said that encryption is allowing terrorists and criminals to communicate their plots covertly.

Nine Canadian men have been arrested as part of a worldwide crackdown on people who shared child sex videos over the Internet. Read More Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superintendent Earla-Kim McColl said the arrests were part of an ongoing investigation code-named Project Koala, which has implicated about 2,500 people worldwide. The videos, ranging from girls in provocative poses to a father raping his young daughters, were sold to clients in 19 countries including teachers, doctors, lawyers and computer experts, said Menno Hagemeijer of the pan-European police organization Europol.

A Colorado woman accused of giving birth in the bathroom of a North Cherry Creek sports bar in 2004 and leaving the baby to die pleaded guilty. Erin Pendleton, 31, pleaded guilty to child abuse resulting in death. Read More She will face up to 40 years in prison when she is sentenced on February 28. The body of the full-term newborn boy was found in the women's restroom of Legends Bar and Grill by a janitor on June 26, 2004. The newborn was stuffed in a plastic bag, at the bottom of the trash bin, covered in a layer of trash, according to the arrest affidavit.

Several teenage Texas gang members have been arrested on suspicion of forcing girls as young as 12 into a prostitution ring. Read More After befriending the girls and getting them high, Varrio Central gang members took them to some regular customers and then sought other men by trolling apartment complexes, offering the girls' services for $50, Fort Worth Police Lieutenant Ken Dean said. The gang apparently targeted runaways and other girls with unstable homes, and if the girls refused to have sex for money the members beat and sexually assaulted them and threatened their families, Dean said. "The age of the victims and suspects is the surprising part of it," Dean said. "To have such young individuals in a somewhat organized business, a forced prostitution ring, is somewhat alarming and such a horrendous crime against the 12- to 16-year-old girls."

An Ohio elementary school teacher will spend the next seven years in prison for having sex with a student. http://www.wlwt.com/news/15071393/detail.html Sandra Bratt, 32, was a third-grade teacher at Peebles Elementary School in Adams County when she began a six-year relationship with an 11-year-old student, prosecutors said. "The charge, with the victim being over 10 years old, could have carried a 10-year sentence," Aaron Haslam, assistant Adams County prosecutor, told The Ledger-Independent. "If he had been under 10 years old, the sentence could have been life in prison."

An Army military police officer is accused of using the Internet to solicit a Virginia teenager to have sex. Read More David Michael Overstreet, 33, was stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, awaiting deployment to Iraq when he was arrested Tuesday on charges of electronic solicitation and attempted sodomy, said First Sgt. Liz Scott of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office. A 16-year-old Spotsylvania boy and his mother told police last month that an Army police officer contacted the boy online, Scott said.

A man wearing hospital scrubs threw a toddler 30 feet from a pedestrian overpass onto a major Honolulu highway, and the boy was later pronounced dead, authorities said. Read More A 23-year-old man was arrested after witnesses saw him throwing something, followed him and called police, officials said. One or two vehicles may have struck the 2 1/2-year-old boy, but it was unclear exactly what killed him, The Honolulu Advertiser reported. There were no reports of a missing child, police Captain Frank Fujii said. Officers were contacting day-care centers and other area facilities to find out where the child came from.

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