Man pleads guilty in pornography case
WAYNESBURG – During his sentencing Thursday in Greene County Court for possessing and disseminating photos and video of children engaged in sexual acts, a Washington Township man told Judge Farley Toothman it was a “huge life lesson learned.”
“It could have possibly got worse if I didn’t get the help I needed,” said Matthew Aaron Feikema, 36, of 565 Washington Road.
Feikema, who was arrested in October after police traced the activity to his computer, pleaded guilty Jan. 8. Toothman sentenced him based on a plea agreement with the Commonwealth to 6 to 23 ½ months in the Greene County jail followed by three years of probation to be served consecutively. Feikema underwent an assessment by the Sex Offender Registration Notification Act board, which determined he is not a violent sexual predator. However, Feikema will be required to register as a sexual offender with SORNA, also known as the Megan’s Law website, for 25 years.
As a special condition of his sentence, Feikema will not be allowed to possess a computer or have Internet access for 23 ½ months. During his probation, it will be at the discretion of the Greene County Probation office to authorize his return to computer and Internet usage, providing he does not violate his parole. An additional condition of sentencing requires Feikema to authorize the release of mental health records from a counselor he acknowledged consulting with since last summer.
Toothman told Feikema he was “checkmated” by the arrest, and the situation “in fact could be worse if not taken care of at this stage.”
On May 11, 2013, the monitoring system for an Internet chat site captured screenshots of a video chat conversation depicting a child between ages 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 their identity.
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 in the Windstream communications network.
Police obtained a court order to direct Windstream to provide them with the address of the customer registered with that IP address. On May 24, Cpl. John Roche of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation Computer Crimes Unit searched Feikema’s residence.
Feikema acknowledged to police he 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 of last year, according to the criminal complaint filed against Feikema.