Man pleads guilty in child pornography case
WAYNESBURG – A Washington Township man pleaded guilty in Greene County court Wednesday to possessing and disseminating photos and video of children engaged in sexual acts.
Matthew Aaron Feikema, 36, of 565 Washington Road, was arrested in October after police traced the activity to his computer.
On May 11, the monitoring system for an Internet chat site captured screenshots of a video chat conversation that showed a child between the ages of 5 and 7 engaged in sexual acts with an adult male. This chat site is free to users and allows them to communicate anonymously via text chatting or video conferencing without registering.
The website reported the incident to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which designated it a cybertip and transmitted the information to the Internet Crimes Against Children task force. The ICAC referred it to the state police that determined the IP address for the user was located in the Windstream communications network.
Police obtained a court order to direct Windstream to provide them with the address of the customer who was registered with that IP address. On May 24, Cpl. John Roche of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation Computer Crime Unit, searched Feikema’s residence.
Feikema acknowledged to police he had downloaded, possessed and shared child pornography via the Internet. He provided them with the specific location to files in his laptop computer where images and videos of child pornography were located.
According to Roche, more than 500 files containing child pornography were found on Feikema’s computer. Roche said these included 492 images and 32 videos, including images of prepubescent children engaged in various sex acts with other children and adults. These images were collected between May 11 and May 23, according to the criminal complaint filed against Feikema.
Sentencing in the case is pending Feikema’s risk assessment under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. However, the Commonwealth has recommended a sentence to the court of 6 to 23 ½ months of incarceration and 3 years of probation to run consecutively.
The court denied Feikema computer access and ruled he may not access the Internet through any device for 23½ months. He is charged with a Tier II level offense under SORNA that will require him to register as a sexual offender under Megan’s Law for 25 years.