A La Ronge man accused of possessing about 32 hours of child pornography appeared before a Prince Albert court on Monday.
Floyd Scott McKenzie, 27, is facing trial after a search of his room turned up as many as 119 sexually explicit videos and images depicting children, some around toddler age. He testified that he never looked at them, nor did he know they were there.
In September 2015, the Internet Child Exploitation Unit sent officers into his parent’s home in La Ronge. Crown prosecutor Lana Morelli described what they found.
On McKenzie’s desk sat a computer, side-by-side with a TV screen. He used them to play video games and watch videos “from 4 p.m. until the sun comes up.” To the left sat a tower of DVDs and bags of chips “folded over precisely.” To Morelli, it was a sign of a highly deliberate mind.
“Everything has its place,” she said. “Everything is as it should be.”
One of those DVDs contained 18 videos of child pornography. Some depicted sexual activity with children, while others focussed on intimate parts of their bodies. The disc was labelled with writing that Morelli said “appeared quite similar to the handwriting of the accused.”
The computer revealed a much longer trail of nefarious activity.
In a computer folder, investigators found a small amount of animated child pornography. As they dug deeper, Morelli said, they recovered 70 videos that someone had deleted. The fact that the computer had not yet overwritten them, she argued, implied that they were deleted recently. They also found thumbnails – low-resolution pictorial markers – for 29 images of child pornography.
The investigators reviewed hours of the material, and determined that 38 videos depicted sexual activity with a child, while 34 revealed obscene shots of nudity.
“Thankfully,” she said, “we did not watch everything in its entirety because it was, at minimum, 32 hours of child pornography.”
Defence lawyer Murray Pelletier acknowledged that many of the videos were child pornography, though he arrived at a somewhat smaller count. His argument focussed on the possibility that someone else had left them on McKenzie’s computer, and on the DVD found in his room.
“Evidence was heard, from Floyd McKenzie, that other people had used the computer and Mr. McKenzie was not always there to observe them,” Pelletier said. “He allows people to do whatever they want on his computer.”
For more on this story, see the June 12 print or e-edition of the Daily Herald.
