Kennett Square man placed under house arrest

Olen Grimes Jr. faces charges that he allegedly filmed 2 girls showering

The Kennett Square businessman facing charges that he illegally filmed two young girls showering in a Poconos hotel has been placed on house arrest after allegations were made that he contacted one of the girls on social media.

On Monday, Common Pleas Judge William P. Mahon modified the bail conditions for Olen Grimes Jr. while he awaits trial to include electronic home monitoring, which requires Grimes to wear an ankle bracelet monitor and restricts his daily activities.

Under general terms of the home monitoring program, criminal defendants or convicted offend- ers are allowed to go to work, attend church services, attend doctors’ appointments, or meet with their attorneys. Otherwise they must stay in their homes. If they leave home outside of permitted hours, court officials overseeing their bail are automatically notified.

Grimes appeared before Mahon on Monday with his attorney, Peter Kratsa of the West Chester law firm of MacElree Harvey. Grimes, in answer to a petition to increase bail filed by Deputy District Attorney Deborah Ryan of the DA’s Child Abuse Unit, denied that he had violated any terms of the bail that was set at his preliminary hearing in August.

Mahon, after hearing from both Kratsa and Ryan, decided not to increase Grimes’ $15,000 cash bail, but ordered him placed on the home monitoring program. He also advised Grimes that he is not allowed to have any contact with minors, with the excep-

tion of those children who accompany their parents while doing business at his art studio and hair salon, both in Kennett Square.

He is also forbidden from having any contact with the two alleged victims in the case, who were 13 or 14 at the time of the charged offenses but who are now in their late teens.

Grimes, 54, of New London, is charged with sexual abuse of children — the offense associated with creating child pornography — invasion of privacy, and endangering the welfare of children. He was arrested in June.

According to a criminal complaint filed against Grimes by Chester County Detective Oscar Rosado, the case against Grimes began in November when he asked a friend to pick up a video camera for him that was in a filing cabinet at the Artworks shop.

Grimes could not retrieve it himself because he was unable to drive because of injuries he suffered in the car crash on Nov. 11 on Baltimore Pike at McFarlan Road in Kennett Township. The collision was so violent, he was trapped in the car and had to be extracted. His legs were crushed. Today, he walks with the aid of a cane.

The friend, identified as Andrew White, picked the camera up and kept it in his car until just before Christmas. He told Rosado that when he played the video on the camera, he saw images of Grimes hiding another

camera in a bathroom, and then of two young girls taking showers at different times.

White told Rosado he made a copy of the video and then gave the camera to Grimes at his home. Soon after leaving, he began getting text messages from Grimes that referred to the video. “Not me, I swear it,” one stated. “I loaned the camera to one of the girls. I can’t even use the damn thing. This is the truth. It was a teenager …”

White turned his copy of the video over to the Kennett Square police in April.

Rosado said that the video was viewed by county Detective Joseph Walton, a member of the office’s Computer Forensic Unit. On it, he saw Grimes hide a video recorder inside a bathroom, covering it with towels. His voice can be heard telling the girls to take a shower. One by one, the two girls, who were not identified in the complaint, enter the bathroom, take off their clothes, shower, and get dressed. Their naked bodies can be seen on the video.

Grimes is then seen coming into the room and collecting the video camera and turning it off, according to Rosado’s affidavit. The two girls, who were 13 or 14 at the time the video was recorded, later told Rosado that they were unaware that they were being filmed, and had not given Grimes permission to do so.

On May 12, Grimes was interviewed by Rosado, and confessed to taping the girls during a trip to Montage Mountain in Moosic about five or six years ago, according to the complaint. He had kept the video himself

since then, he said.

Kratsa has stated that he and his client are working to resolve the matter with the DA’s Office, “in a mutually agreeable manner.” In his response to Ryan’s bail petition, he called the alleged offenses “one discreet incident.”

In her petition to have Grimes’ bail increased, Ryan stated that his original bail had been increased to $15,000 cash on Aug. 1 after it was learned that he had contacted one of the alleged victims on her Facebook account. At the time, Ryan said, Senior Magisterial

District Judge Robert A. Saraceni explained the “no contact” provision of his bail “at length.”

Ryan said that on Sept. 12, Rosado received a telephone call from Grimes’ daughterin-law, who had seen an article about his arrest in the Daily Local News. She told the detective that Grimes had had unsupervised contact with her two daughters in July, after his arrest. “She stated that she did not know that there was a no-contact with minors provision until she read about it,” the petition states.

In his response, Kratsa

said that the bail conditions that were set at his preliminary arraignment were unclear to begin with, and that he had to determine whether there was any prohibition for Grimes having contact with minors who came to his businesses. He said he was told there would not be.

Kratsa, however, denied that Grimes “had contact” with one of the girls via Facebook, but did acknowledge that his bail, formerly unsecured, was raised and that Saraceni “sternly” explained what “no contact” meant. He also denied that

the visit he had with his grandchildren at his New London home in July was unsupervised. He said the children had stayed overnight before a trip to the beach with their mother and Grimes’ wife.

“To the extent this was a violation of a bail condition, it was due to an innocent misunderstanding,” Kratsa wrote. Otherwise, Grimes has been in compliance with all of his bail conditions.

Olen Grimes