Agent’s child porn probe leads to Oak Harbor man

A child pornography investigation by a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security led to an Oak Harbor residence, according to court documents.

Agents served a search warrant on the home of John R. Allen, 74, last year and found more than 10,000 images and 335 videos of child pornography on his computer, according to the special agent’s report.

Prosecutors charged Allen in Island County Superior Court with two counts of possession of depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct in the first degree and one count of the charge in the third degree.

Allen could face as much as five years in prison under the standard sentencing range if convicted of the charges.

The agent was investigating a file sharing network last year when he identified the internet provider addresses associated with the downloading of child pornography, the report states. The service provider gave the agent the home address associated with the IP addresses.

Allen admitted that he had been looking at child porn for about 10 years, the report alleges. Allen reportedly said he never shared the images with others.

In addition to possessing child porn, agents also identified 27,000 images and 109 videos they categorized as child exploitation or “age difficult to determine,” the agent wrote.

The images and videos were sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children where they were checked by the “child recognition identification system.”

A total of 1,523 images and videos involved children who had previously been identified as victims of child pornography, the report says.