Ex- Conway officer charged with possessing child porn
Conway police said Tuesday that a former police officer was arrested Monday and charged with possessing child pornography.
Dustin Michael O’Dell, 32, of 147 Green Valley Drive No. 2 in Greenbrier was arrested Monday by Greenbrier police and turned over to Conway police, according to a police report.
O’Dell, who was charged with one count of distributing, possessing or viewing child pornography, was taken to the Faulkner County jail and released Monday night on a $ 5,000 bond. A phone number for O’Dell was not found Tuesday.
On Sept. 5, a Conway computer repairman notified police that he had found what he believed to be child pornography on a laptop computer belonging to O’Dell, the report said. O’Dell, who was then a Conway police officer, had brought the computer in for repairs earlier that day.
A detective was shown the open laptop that displayed several video thumbnails, according to the report.
“I could see that one of the thumbnails showed a very young, pre- pubescent female and a penis,” the detective wrote in the report. “There was no question that this was child pornography.”
After obtaining a search warrant for the computer, detectives “located three videos on the laptop that were definitely child pornography and two others that are suspected to be,” according to the report.
The computer hadn’t worked since August 2012.
A detective interviewed O’Dell on Sept. 8, the report said. O’Dell denied knowing how the child pornography got on the computer but admitted to using a peer- topeer file sharing program to download adult porn in the past.
The detective told O’Dell that the three videos of children were in a folder labeled “Young,” and that there were other folders on the computer labeled “Beast” and “Asian.”
O’Dell denied downloading the bestiality videos in the “Beast” folder but admitted he did have “a thing for Asian women and there would be videos with that content,” the report said.
Another laptop computer and a flash drive at O’Dell’s home were searched with O’Dell’s consent, but no pornography was discovered on either device, according to the report.
Conway police started an internal administrative inquiry and a criminal investigation Sept. 9, according to a news release.
O’Dell later told police that his sister might have inadvertently downloaded the pornography while copying files to O’Dell’s laptop from a former husband’s computer in 2009, the report said. O’Dell’s sister was looking for messages between her then- husband and another woman at the time.
When the sister was contacted, though, her story and O’Dell’s story didn’t match, according to the report.
After the administrative inquiry concluded, O’Dell, who had been a Conway police officer since March 25, 2013, resigned Sept. 21.
The separate criminal case was turned over to the prosecutor’s office for prosecutorial review, and a warrant was issued Monday for O’Dell’s arrest, the release said.