Court docs: Stamford teacher uploaded child porn at school
STAMFORD — Former math teacher Gregory Kelly used his Cloonan Middle School account to upload images of alleged child pornography, according to his arrest warrant. The recently unsealed warrant also details how Kelly allegedly secretly filmed two teenage woman he was tasked with watching while their parents were away.
Kelly, who pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Thursday to felony charges of possession of child pornography and voyeurism, was arrested Feb. 7 following a six-month investigation after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children warned Stamford police on Aug. 1 that someone was uploading images of child pornography from a Stamford schools account.
Kelly, the father of two young children and a former coach in the Greenwich school district, was living in Stamford at the time of
his arrest. He has since moved to New Jersey after posting a $500,000 courtappearance bond.
Kelly’s attorney, Eugene Riccio, declined to address specific activities that his client was alleged to have undertaken in the warrant, but he said there could be some legal issues raised that may help Kelly.
“In cases of this nature, there are usually issues surrounding the search warrants that were involved in the investigation,” Riccio said Friday afternoon.
As soon as the Stamford schools learned of the allegations against Kelly, he was put on administrative leave.
Police said Kelly turned himself in when he learned that a warrant had been granted for his arrest and school officials said he has since resigned and is no longer employed by the district. Kelly was put on leave by the schools once officials were notified of the investigation into his alleged actions.
The warrant, unsealed
on Friday afternoon, says eight child pornography files were uploaded July 30. After the tip from NCMEC, Stamford police quickly determined the IP address used to upload the files belonged to the Stamford Public School District. They traced the latitude and longitude information to the area of Cloonan Middle School, the affidavit said.
The documents uploaded contained personal and work information for Kelly, who at the time was employed by Stamford schools as a math teacher, the affidavit said.
The images were enough for police to get a judge to sign a search warrant for Kelly’s Bend of River Lane residence and the raid took place just after 6 a.m. on Aug. 21, when Stamford police and officers of the Southwest Technical Investigations Unit executed the warrant, the affidavit said.
During the search, officers seized more than two dozen items that were taken to be analyzed, the affidavit said. Later in the day, officers went into Kelly’s classroom, Room 303, and inside a locked closet they found and seized a laptop, flash drive, two computer towers, a monitor and three additional desktop computers, all of which could have been used by Kelly.
After searching the devices with help from the FBI New Haven Forensics Division, scores of child pornography were discovered, the affidavit said.
While there is no indication that Kelly knew any of the children depicted in the images, police were able to identify victims in two videos filmed using hidden cameras, the affidavit said.
According to the affidavit, one video showed a young woman enter a bedroom and undress.
Using the images from the video, police were able to match them to the Instagram account of a woman from Stamford and discovered she was friends on Facebook with Kelly’s wife, the affidavit said.
When police spoke with the now college-aged woman, she gasped and told them she recognized the room as a spare bedroom in Kelly’s home, the affidavit said. She said it had likely been filmed in 2016 when she was 16 and staying with the Kelly family for a weekend while her parents were away. The woman said Kelly’s wife was her math tutor and a good family friend.
When asked if Kelly ever did or said anything inappropriate to her, she said Kelly was “a bit weird and nerdy, but nothing beyond that,” the affidavit said.
The second video showed Kelly set up a camera in another bedroom and then leave. A few minutes later, a different young woman entered and undressed, the affidavit said.
For the second victim, police did not say how they identified her, but when they showed her the video, she immediately began crying and told investigators it was filmed in her own bedroom. When asked who would have had access, the woman blurted out, “Greg Kelly,” the affidavit said.
The woman told police, around 2014 when she was 16, Kelly and his wife would stay at her house when her parents were away and babysit her and her brothers, the affidavit said.
When she was asked if Kelly had acted inappropriately to her, she said Kelly once remarked on the mobile messaging app Snapchat that she looked very grown up, the affidavit said. The woman said she thought the comment was creepy and blocked him after that.
Police said Kelly took still images from both of the videos and digitally altered them to make it appear as if he were having sex with the victims, the affidavit said.
At his arraignment Thursday, Judge Bruce Hudock issued two protective orders prohibiting Kelly from contacting or stalking both of the women.
Kelly is charged with five counts of second-degree possession of child pornography, two counts of thirddegree child pornography and two counts of voyeurism.
He is due back in court April 13.