Coach charged with child porn
The owner of a gymnastics center admitted recording girls in the locker room.
The coach and owner of a Racine County gymnastics center who admitted secretly recording girls in the facility’s locker room was charged Thursday with possession of child pornography that investigators found on a computer.
“We know there are going to be hundreds of victims,” Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said at a news conference. More than 150 calls have already come in from parents concerned their child might have been recorded, or worse. He asked them to be patient as he expects the investigation to take weeks.
According to the criminal complaint:
James Kivisto, 49, who owns and lives at the Wind Lake Gymnastics Center in the Town of Norway, was discovered after a parent noticed a camera in the girls bathroom at the center and took it home.
The parent watched the video on the camera and saw that it captured a teenage girl fixing her hair while looking in a mirror, then again when she returned to the mirror in a different outfit. The parent stopped watching and called Town of Norway police.
Police talked to Kivisto, who admitted recording girls in the center’s bathroom. He admitted he liked to watch girls as young as 12 and used the photos and videos he captured to masturbate.
Schmaling said Thursday that Kivisto has denied sharing the videos he created with anyone else, and kept a log of 803 names of children who have attended the center.
But on a computer at the center, according to the complaint, Racine County sheriff ’s investigators on Monday found other photos and videos of girls that age or younger engaged in explicit sexual conduct. The complaint doesn’t specify whether those images and videos were made by Kivisto or downloaded off the internet.
The Racine County Sheriff’s Office is encouraging any parents of children who attended Wind Lake Gymnastics to call (262) 636-3990 to speak with an investigator on the case.
According to the sheriff’s office, Kivisto has run Wind Lake Gymnastics for about 11 years and has coached gymnastics in Racine and Milwaukee counties for about 30 years.
So far, Kivisto faces 10 counts of possession of child pornography, each punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He is being held at the Racine County Jail on $150,000 bail and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing March 21.
Schmaling said investigators are trying to identify children in at least 100 images recovered from Kivisto’s electronic devices, and are continuing to scour the devices — seized pursuant to a search warrant — for more.
He said Kivisto had at least two hidden cameras, one in the toilet area and one in the changing area of the locker room.