Fairfax County Police Watch: Former law enforcement officer agrees to plea deal in child porn case

Former law enforcement officer agrees to plea deal in child porn case

Robert Sullivan

A Liberty man arrested last fall on federal child pornography charges has signed an agreement in which he would plead guilty to two counts of child exploitation, U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett said Wednesday.

Derek D. Walton, 31, was arrested in August 2013 after FBI agents raided his home at 5242 Greenwood Church Road. At the time, authorities located a laptop computer, a USB flash drive and a video camera, which allegedly contained images of Walton and a female victim.

“Today’s announcement is that Mr. Walton acknowledges his guilt for the production of child pornography,” Hogsett said during a visit Wednesday to the Palladium-Item.

Walton will appear in court to formally accept the plea agreement and then later face sentencing. Dates for those two hearings in federal court have not been set yet, Hogsett said.

If accepted, the agreement would see Walton face a minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 60 years in prison, Hogsett said. Federal laws also require that Walton will serve at least 85 percent of the sentence handed down in the case. He also could face lifetime supervised release upon completion of his prison time.

Walton had a history spanning a decade as a law enforcement official in eastern Indiana, including a stint as a reserve officer with the Richmond Police Department and as a deputy marshal for the Laurel Police Department. Most recently, Walton had been a reserve deputy with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department since 2004 and had served as a reserve deputy and jail officer with the Union County Sheriff’s Department before his arrest.

An investigation by the FBI revealed Walton had used an AOL email account to exchange child pornographic images and videos. In addition to using his home computer, investigators uncovered 29 instances where Walton accessed his AOL account while at the Franklin County Security Center between October and November 2011 to engage in illegal child pornographic activity and conversations.

During a search of his home in August 2013, authorities found a USB drive and a camera hidden in different locations within the home. Those items contained 17 still images and two videos of a nude female victim between the ages of 13 and 14. The videos include images of the victim showering and changing clothes while being secretly recorded inside Walton’s home in November 2012.

The arrest was part of the U.S. Attorney’s Operation Community Watch, a program that allows federal investigators and prosecutors the use of cutting-edge techniques to identify and charge individuals in Indiana engaged in the receipt and trafficking of child pornography. Hogsett said this case involved efforts by the FBI, the Indiana State Police, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, the Indiana Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

“The reason Operation Community Watch is so important is because the goal is to identify pornographers in southern Indiana in an effort to prevent Hoosier children from being victimized,” Hogsett said.

“In this case, we not only caught someone who was a trusted member of the community and a part of law enforcement involved in trafficking child pornographic images, but also someone who was victimizing Hoosier children as a pornographic producer.”

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.

The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits some one else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. Louis D. Brandeis, part of his dissent in the case "Olmstead v. United States", 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928)