2 men being held in child-porn case
Two babysitters, one an Eagle Scout, used their jobs to take explicit photos and videos of children that they then exchanged with each another using Dropbox, Kik Messenger and an external hard drive, according to a pair of FBI complaints.
The complaints, filed in April in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, identify the two men as Bryan Petersen, 24, of Tiburon and Ryan Michael Spencer, 19, of Aptos (Santa Cruz County).
Spencer’s primary source of income is babysitting, and he took images and videos of the multiple children left in his care while they were naked, then traded them for other images online, FBI officials said in the complaints.
Spencer claimed to have touched the genitals of at least one child he babysat while the child was sleeping, according to one of the complaints.
Petersen led camping trips for young boys as an Eagle Scout and worked as a tutor, according to prosecutors. As early as 2013, Petersen had folders on his laptop containing hundreds of sexual photos and videos of children, the complaint against him alleges.
In 2015, an FBI investigator serving a warrant on Petersen’s Dropbox account found he had added and deleted hundreds of explicit photos and videos over the course of two months in 2015, sorting them into folders with names like “Misc. Boys,” “boys pics” and “Best Videos.”
Peterson also allegedly filmed a video of one child dancing naked when the boy was 3 or 4 years old, then sent the video to a minor, according to the case.
About a year ago, Spencer gave Petersen a hard drive loaded with thousands of child pornography images and videos, prosecutors allege.
Petersen also gave photos to Spencer, some of them images of children he’d babysat, which were sorted into folders labeled with victims’ names, according to court documents.
Petersen’s Tiburon home and computer were searched by investigators April 27, yielding tens of thousands of child porn files, according to the case.
Both men are being held at Glenn Dyer Detention Facility in Oakland and are ineligible for bail, county records showed.