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Click Post BulletinMOLESTATION TAPE: Police locate older child on tape
Girl, now a teen, wasn't assaulted
By BETH WALTON
REVIEW-JOURNAL
One of the young girls on a tape of the sexual assault of a child has been identified and is safe and at home in Pahrump with her parents, authorities said.
After the media broadcast photographs of the girl, authorities were notified late Wednesday night that the girl, who is now a teen, was OK, said Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo. The girl was not a victim of sexual abuse on the tape nor did the suspect seen on the videotape sexually abuse her, DeMeo said.
Police say the teen was a victim of a peeping tom in January 2005, when someone videotaped the girl through a window at her Pahrump home as she looked at herself in a mirror. After noticing someone watching her, the girl turns around and the video fades away. Police believe the voyeur stopped taping and ran away after being noticed.
The teenager told her parents, who called authorities, but when sheriff's deputies got to the home, whoever had been watching her was gone.
As of Thursday night, authorities were still trying to identify the molester and the younger girl whom he is seen sexually assaulting on the video. She is estimated to be 4 or 5 years old.
Because they now know the date of the peeping tom case, authorities now have a better idea of when the sexual assault was filmed. They believe it couldn't have been any earlier than January 2005 because the footage of the older girl was shot before the sexual assault, DeMeo said. The recorded assault interrupts and records over the voyeur footage.
Previously, officers had only been able to date the video to sometime after 2004 because of the manufacture date of a DVD player seen in the background on the tape.
Darren Tuck, 26, of Pahrump gave the tape to Nye County sheriff's investigators Sept. 8, after another man reported seeing it, said Detective David Boruchowitz. No charges have been made.
Tuck was arrested for promoting child pornography and possession of child pornography, both felonies. Promoting child pornography is punishable by life in prison and its possession is punishable by six years.
Police say Tuck had the pornographic video of the child for at least five months, and showed it to other people, before turning it over to authorities.
No one else who has seen the video has been arrested, Boruchowitz said.
"While it is certainly not acceptable to watch child pornography by legal standards, our priority on this is finding this little girl who could very possibly be living in this situation," he said.
Police believe the man on the tape was someone the girl had been entrusted to. She isn't combative with him, DeMeo said.
Most sexual predators of children are known to the family, said Sgt. Leonard Marshall of the Metropolitan Police Department's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
Voyeurism is a common prelude to child molestation, he said. Sex offenders often indulge in increasingly risky behavior, he said.
It's a compulsion for them, Marshall said. "That's why it's so serious," he said. "There's almost no way to stop it."
Anyone with information about the Pahrump case can e-mail detectives at findchild@nyesheriff.net.