Ex-deputy given 10 years in child porn case
A former Harris County sheriff ’s deputy was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison on charges of possession of child pornography after his ex-wife testified that he blamed her for viewing lewd images because she had not been intimate enough.
Without handcuffs, Donald Dehnert was led into a holding room for Harris County Jail inmates as his family watched after the sentencing — the maximum for an offense of that nature and longer than what prosecutors recommended. Judge Kelli Johnson of the 178th District Court handed down the punishment.
“This type of case is very troubling, and considering the evidence, the striking thing is you violated the community you were sworn to protect,” Johnson said, adding that she took issue with Dehnert’s apparent attempt to blame his ex-wife and his father’s death for his actions.
“You are the reason there’s a market for child pornography,” she continued.
In a joint law enforcement investigation, authorities in 2018 accused Dehnert and dozens of others of committing internet crimes against children. Dehnert at one point messaged with an undercover officer about meeting with two young girls — a rendezvous that did not happen.
The charges ballooned to 10 counts after the initial investigation, records show. Most of the charges were dropped last October after a guilty plea.
A separate charge of criminal solicitation to commit aggravated sexual assault of a child in Dallas County is pending.
An investigator with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office testified Monday that he found several thousand images and videos that had been deleted but not erased from a flash drive seized from Dehnert’s Kingwood home in March 2018.
“There were a lot of different abuse pictures,” investigator Michael Gray told the court during a pre-sentencing investigation, a type of hearing after some pleas to aid a judge’s decision on punishment.
About a week after Dehnert was arrested, he was fired from the sheriff’s office — an agency where he had worked for 26 years and where several relatives also worked.
Dehnert’s ex-wife, also a sheriff’s deputy, took the stand and described how Dehnert confronted her amid the allegations. Aspects of her testimony were not allowed in the courtroom because it involved alleged offenses for which the defense was not given notice.
“He said that if I had been a better wife, this is something he wouldn’t have done,” she said. “I didn’t understand how I could make him want child pornography.”
She has not spoken to Dehnert in the three years since his arrest and sat opposite from him the courtroom ahead of his sentencing. The two divorced in 2019.
Dehnert, when questioned, said he no longer blames his exwife for his actions.
“That was wrong of me at the time,” Dehnert said.
He made a tearful reference to the 2013 death of his father, a retired investigator with the district attorney’s office, and how the viewing of inappropriate images of children followed that. His online behavior progressed to entering chat rooms in which sex acts with children were discussed.
The images found on his electronic devices were unsolicited from those chat rooms, Dehnert said.
The prosecutor in the case, Timothy Goodwin, described what he said was Dehnert’s escalating behavior. He stayed in those chat rooms despite the images being shared and then engaged in a conversation with an undercover officer about giving a child NyQuil to relax them for a sex act, the prosecutor said.
“It was a fantasy chat,” Dehnert continued. “In my mind, there were no children.”
Former Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo addressed Dehnert’s arrest in June 2018 while summarizing the dozens of people, including a Houston Police Department sergeant, arrested in an online sexual exploitation investigation spanning eight Southeast Texas counties.
“He had an AR-15 with him,” Acevedo then said. “He actually admitted under an interrogation that he was going to sexually assault this individual, this young girl, and then he was going to rob her. That’s how sick these people are.”
Dehnert’s defense attorney, Mark Bennett, had requested probation in the case.
“This was very disappointing,” Bennett said as he left the courtroom. “Even the state asked for three years. We are stunned that the judge trebled the state’s recommendation.”
The judge said she determined that probation was not a reasonable punishment because she did not believe Dehnert had accepted responsibility for his actions. The alarming nature of the images was also an issue, she continued.
Though prosecutors asked for least three years Monday, they called the judge’s decision appropriate.