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It is an amazing piece of detective work. Seven officers from Toronto Police's Sex Crime Unit used modern technology and some old fashioned detective work to identify a 6-year-old North Carolina girl, whose pictures were posted on the Internet by a child pornographer.
Cops found 450 samples of the disgusting data on a special police website last December, and were revolted by what they saw. “One of the images … showed her with writings on her body that said ‘Kill me, I'm a slut’ in some type of red liquid,” points out Staff Inspector Brody Smollet. Others depicted her being urinated on, threatened with a knife and being kept confined in a dog cage.
The determined detectives spent two sleepless nights trying to find the unknown child. They started by identifying a wristband she wore in one of the pictures as coming from the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Then, using a tiny sliver of a uniform logo the pedophile had tried to blur out, the cops discovered the school the child attended.
They contacted their North Carolina counterparts and cops there finally slapped the cuffs on Brian Schellenberger. The 41-year-old suspect is facing several counts of child exploitation and possession of child pornography, and will be in court for arraignment on Monday.
Police contend he’d been hurting the little girl for years, and have also obtained evidence he sexually abused a three month-old child.
The local cops shed a lot of sweat during their probe, but some also shed real tears with the success of their Mission Impossible. Fewer than 300 similar tiny victims have been identified worldwide, although the victim pool is said to be between 50-100,000.
- The North Carolina case has led to a ripple effect of rescue throughout the U.S. Smollet reveals a woman in Dallas has been arrested for allegedly “renting out her children to people”. Those kids have been saved, too.
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