OAKLAND LAWFUEL – The US Law Newswire – United States Attorney Scott N. Schools announced that Warren G.H. Crecy, Jr., 54, was sentenced today to 180 months in prison for transporting child pornography. According to court documents, Mr. Crecy engaged in an Internet chat with a 14-year-old girl, sent child pornography to the girl over the Internet, and asked her to take nude photographs of her genitalia and send them to him in the mail. In reality, the 14-year-old girl was an undercover police officer. Mr. Crecy was arrested by federal agents on March 23, 2006 at the U.S. Post Office in Emeryville, California, when he arrived to pick up the anticipated photographs of the girl on his way to sex offender treatment therapy.
Pursuant to the terms of the plea agreement, the Honorable Saundra Brown Armstrong also sentenced Mr. Crecy to a lifetime term of supervised release and a $1000 fine. In addition, Mr. Crecy will be required to register as a sex offender. Mr. Crecy pled guilty to transporting child pornography under Title 18, United States Code, Section 2252(a)(1) on May 15, 2007.
Mr. Crecy, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, is a retired Captain from the United States Army and a retired Colonel from the United States Army Reserves. At the time of his arrest, Mr. Crecy was living in a room at St. Columba’s Catholic Church in Oakland, California. A search of his room revealed that Mr. Crecy had been storing his collection of child pornography on a flash drive. At the time, Mr. Crecy already was a registered sex offender.
Mr. Crecy’s prior convictions involved attempted lewd and lascivious acts upon a minor under the age of 14, transporting harmful material to a minor, and possession of obscene material depicting a person under the age of 18. According to court documents, he pled guilty to these offenses in 2003 after chatting on the Internet with an undercover police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl. Mr. Crecy was arrested after he drove to meet the “girl” and arrived with lingerie, boxes of condoms, and a video camera. A subsequent search of his residence revealed a collection of child pornography. For these offenses, he was sentenced in Santa Clara County to 120 days in jail. Because of his prior child pornography conviction, Judge Armstrong concluded that Mr. Crecy was subject to a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence on the instant offense, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2252(b)(1).
The investigation of Mr. Crecy, part of the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood, is the result of the efforts of the New Waterford, Ohio, Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the United States Postal Inspection Service. Project Safe Childhood is a national initiative launched last year by the U.S. Department of Justice aimed at combining federal, state and local law enforcement resources in order to bring more online child exploitation prosecutions, and to educate the public about the dangers that the Internet poses to children.
Michelle Morgan-Kelly, the District’s Project Safe Childhood Coordinator, is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the case, with the assistance of legal assistant Cynthia Daniel.
Further Information:
Case #: CR-06-0222-SBA
A copy of this press release may be found on the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s website at www.usdoj.gov/usao/can.
Electronic court filings and further procedural and docket information are available at https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/ (click on the link for “to retrieve documents from the court”).
Judges’ calendars with schedules for upcoming court hearings can be viewed on the court’s website at www.cand.uscourts.gov.
