Former Navy man sought on child porn charge

The Island County Prosecutor’s Office is going after a former Navy man suspected of possessing child pornography after the federal government declined to charge him.

Prosecutors charged 36-year-old Dennis McCoy, a former sailor at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, in Island County Superior Court June 29 with possession of depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

On June 29, Judge Vickie Churchill authorized a $50,000 arrest warrant for McCoy.

Chief Criminal Prosecutor Colleen Kenimond said McCoy’s whereabouts are unknown since he left the Navy. His last known address was in Seminole, Fla.

Special Agent Don Johnston with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service handled the case. He wrote in his report that the investigation began in 2008 after Immigration and Customs Enforcement discovered that McCoy had purchased child pornography from a Russian website.

During an interrogation, McCoy admitted to paying $500 to gain access to the website, but that he was advised he would have to pay even more to actually see the child pornography, the report states. He admitted to looking at child pornography, but said he deleted the images from his computer, the special agent wrote.

Federal agents sent McCoy’s laptop and hard drive to the Defense Forensic Computer Laboratory for study. More than 2,000 images and 12 movie files of possible child pornography were recovered from the computer, the report states.

Among those files, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children identified a total of 158 known images and 10 video files of child pornography on McCoy’s computer, the report states.

Kenimond said that the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to charge McCoy. By the time the decision was made, McCoy had left the Navy and was no longer in the jurisdiction of military courts.

But Kenimond said that Prosecutor Greg Banks felt that McCoy should answer for the alleged crime that occurred on Whidbey Island, so he decided to prosecute.

If convicted of the charge, McCoy could face a standard sentencing range of a year to a year and two months in prison.

Contact Whidbey News Times Assistant editor Jessie Stensland at jstensland@whidbeynewsgroup.com or 360.675.6611 ext. 5056.

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