DETROIT (AP) - Police from a small Ohio town have helped Wayne County authorities arrest a Detroit man on child pornography charges.
Jeffrey Burt Vandeveer has been arraigned Wednesday on eight felony counts, including distribution of child sexually abusive material and dissemination of sexually explicit material to a minor.
Bond information was incomplete and court files did not indicate if Vandeveer had an attorney.
Wayne County sheriff's deputies were contacted in February by officers in New Waterford, Ohio, about 70 miles southeast of Cleveland.
An undercover New Waterford officer posing as a young girl over the Internet had received sexually explicit chats and an explicit image of minors engaged in sex.
The 45-year-old Vandeveer was arrested Tuesday. Deputies have seized his home computer.
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From the Wayne County Sheriff....
Tip from police in tiny Ohio town leads to arrest of Detroit man on child porn charges
Jeffrey Burt Vandeveer’s 45th birthday is one he likely won’t ever forget after being arraigned Wednesday on eight child porn related charges, Sheriff Warren C. Evans announced today.
Deputies arrested the Detroit resident Tuesday afternoon at his home in the 9500 block of Grandville after executing a search warrant to obtain his computer. Evans said that his office had received information from the New Waterford, Ohio, police department, which had been investigating Vandeveer since he initiated a series of sexually explicit chats with an undercover New Waterford officer over a three-day period beginning Christmas Day.
New Waterford is a tiny town of approximately 1,300 just west of the Pennsylvania border that has a police force of only 12 fulltime officers. The town is half way between Pittsburgh, PA and Akron, OH and has a job base centered around the steel industry.
“We received credible information from this small police department that was solid and helpful to us in building our own investigation and ultimately led to the arrest of a suspected pedophile,” Evans said. “Usually, my department is the one assisting smaller agencies, so this is something new.”
In fact, the undercover New Waterford officer posing as the young girl was Chief Dan Haueter, who also acts as the lead investigator for his department’s Internet Child Protection Unit. Haueter had been chatting with Vandeveer for several days when Vandeveer allegedly sent Haueter an explicit image of himself, as well as an image that showed an underage girl engaged in a sex act with two underage boys.
After tracing Vandeveer’s Internet activity to Detroit, Haueter forwarded his information in late February to Evans’ Internet Crime Unit, which began its own investigation. After they executed a search warrant on Vandeveer’s Internet service provider, Evans said his officers were able to determine that Vandeveer had several other images of child pornography stored in his email account.
#more#
Deputies seized Vandeveer’s home computer, which they will search for any additional child pornographic images.
Suspect had contacted Wayne County Deputies before
Evans said this was not the first time Vandeveer had crossed his investigators’ path. Vandeveer also had contacted an undercover Wayne County Deputy – who was posing as a 13-year-old girl – last June. During that single chat, Vandeveer was sexually explicit, but never followed up with anything more. Still, Evans said that Vandeveer’s prior contact with deputies would strengthen their case against him.
Evans said that working with an agency less than 1/100th the size of his own shows that that the desire to protect innocent children is something is that is shared by police officers everywhere, no matter the amount of resources available to them.
“This case should send a message to parents that child predators don’t just target kids in large urban areas. They lurk everywhere.” Evans said. “It also should send a message to these predators that it’s not just large urban police agencies like mine that are patrolling the Internet. It’s also small towns like New Waterford, Ohio and this case clearly demonstrates that we know how to work together – even if we have to cross state lines.”
Vandeveer was arraigned Wednesday afternoon in 36th District Court on charges of:
• Two counts of Distribution of Child Sexually Abusive Material
o (10 year)
• Two counts of Dissemination of Sexually Explicit Material to a Minor
o (4 year)
• Two counts of Attempting to Disseminate Sexually Explicit Material to Minors
o (1 year)
• One count of distribute, promote or finance the distribution of or promotion of child pornography
o (7 year)
• One count conspire, attempt or prepare to distribute, receive, finance or promote child pornography.
o (7 year)
