Sacramento investigator details online child sex abuse case with ‘hundred-plus victims’
When Sacramento County Sheriff ’s Sgt. Juan Hidalgo and his investigators first received a tip of a person uploading child porn onto the internet, he did not expect they would find more than 100 potential victims of child sexual abuse.
Hidalgo thought they would just find evidence of suspected child porn distribution, as they have in many other cases. But they also found a Sacramento County man suspected of using social media to lure children into performing sexual acts online at his direction; children as young as 6 years old.
“And then as the detective continued to do his investigation and look further into what we had, he was able to find more victims, and then it just kind of spread and spread into a hundred-plus victims,” said Hidalgo, who supervises a regional task force dedicated to finding child sexual predators online.
Hidalgo was speaking of the case of 24-year-old Demetrius Carl Davis, who was arrested last week. Davis faces 32 felony counts of committing a lewd or lascivious act with a child younger than 14 years old, in a case filed by the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office.
Davis could face other charges in federal court or in other jurisdictions. Sacramento County sheriff ’s officials said Davis is accused of victimizing over 80 children throughout the United States; children from California and 25 other states, including Texas, Indiana, Florida and New York.
Investigators from Hidalgo’s cyber task force are working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help identify at least 15 other children from six other countries who have been allegedly victimized by Davis. And they believe there could be others, since Hidalgo said Davis communicated with well over 100 children online.
Task force funding not in California budget
It’s painstaking investigative work that could go on for months before an arrest is made, as the task force searches through forensic analysis and numerous digital files. But Hidalgo said state funding to train and equip the task force could go away, possibly ending their ability to keep up with an ever-changing digital world that predators hide in as they prey on unsuspecting children.
Hidalgo and Sacramento County Undersheriff Jim Barnes have urged California residents to contact Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, as well as their local state lawmaker, and make sure task force funding is included in the governor’s updated budget proposal later this month. The state funding also equips and trains regional investigative teams in San Jose, Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego.
“This is what the task force was created for; to have all these people working together for one purpose,” Hidalgo told The Sacramento Bee. “And that’s the purpose of saving children.”
Hidalgo supervises the Sacramento Valley High-tech Crimes Task Force, which has an Identity Theft team, a Digital Forensics team and the Internet Crimes Against Children team.
The Internet Crimes team, which investigated Davis, serves 30 counties in Northern California from Stanislaus County to the Oregon border. It has trained and equipped investigators at about 100 law enforcement agencies throughout the region, giving them the capability of investigating online child predator cases in their area.
But Hidalgo also supervises about 20 investigators in Sacramento, taking on cases in the largest metro area in the task force’s region. It was one of his Internet Crimes investigators following up on a tip that led to Davis’ arrest.
The cyber tip came from the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children; a report of an online account suspected of uploading child sexual abuse material onto the internet.
The tip is just one of thousands the task force receives each year, and that annual number keeps increasing. Hidalgo said the task force received about 3,000 tips in 2019, about 7,000 in 2021 and about 3,000 so far this year. He said they’re on track to receive about 10,000 tips this year.
He said the task force determines which tips they can follow up on immediately and assign them to investigators in other areas or his investigators based in Sacramento. They include investigators from the Sacramento Police, Sacramento County Probation and Folsom Police, along with law enforcement agencies in Placer and San Joaquin counties and federal investigators.