Former Gretna pastor jailed almost five years for child-porn, voyeurism

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This article was published 05/01/2017 (3560 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A former pastor is serving a prison sentence after he admitted to secretly videotaping women and girls in washrooms and watching child pornography on his work computer at church.

Dean Marco Funk, 36, was a pastor at the Gretna Bergthaler Mennonite Church for several years before he was charged with two counts of producing child pornography, two counts of voyeurism and possession of child pornography more than two years ago. He was sentenced in Steinbach last week to four years and eight months in prison for crimes provincial court Judge Ken Champagne decried as a breach of trust and a violation of the victims’ privacy and sexual integrity.

“The breach of trust — and it’s not just the trust of a man who’s a leader in the church, who’s a pastor, who has a large following — it goes beyond that. It’s the trust of a friend,” the judge said.

Funk has a “lifelong journey” of rehabilitation ahead of him, the judge said, noting Funk’s attraction to child pornography intensified prior to his arrest.

“Where was this going? How would this end? This offending behaviour was escalating. I think he recognized that and there was a sense of relief at being caught,” Champagne said.

Funk was charged in May 2014 after a lengthy police investigation prompted by the discovery of his cellphone inside a girls change room at a pool party several weeks earlier. The girls who had been recorded inside the change room found the phone — which Funk later admitted to planting — deleted the videos, reporting the incident to police. Funk later confessed to that and other child-pornography offences.

He admitted he did research on voyeurism websites while attempting to capture images of unsuspecting victims, court heard. In May 2012, about two years prior to the pool incident, Funk recorded video inside a washroom in Moose Lake during a camping trip, capturing images of two 14-year-old girls. During the Canada Day weekend that same year, he again hid his cellphone inside the washroom of a cabin in the Whiteshell area, capturing images of adult women.

In a victim-impact statement, one of the people whose images he captured said she never feels safe from “prying eyes” and now checks for cameras every time she uses a washroom.

“I look at everyone around me and I wonder what their true intentions are toward me,” she said. “I will never truly be able to trust anyone again.”

Funk admitted to accessing child pornography from 2009 to May 2014 after police found 174 images on a computer turned over to investigators by church administration. Funk had been deleting the images after he viewing, but police were able to recover them. They also found evidence that the same computer may have been used to view child pornography prior to Funk’s employment at the church.

Funk has been going to counselling and is a member of Sex Addicts Anonymous. His defence lawyer, Ian McNair, said Funk eventually hopes to contribute to his secular and religious communities.

In front of a full courtroom gallery, Funk apologized to the victims, to the church in Gretna and to the larger community, saying he had sinned against them and against God.

“I’m grateful for the courage shown by the victims who brought my actions to light because my arrest and these past 2 1/2 years have helped me to begin to understand what was going on with me,” he said.

“What I did was wrong and I’m sorry. I profoundly lament the man that I was, the things I did, and I am committed to not doing these things again.”

Champagne, remarking on the “tremendous increase” in child pornography cases making their way through the courts in recent years and the resulting harsher minimum sentences that have been imposed, said these kinds of crimes lead to “a long and everlasting trail of victims,” and that rehabilitation is key for offenders such as Funk.

“This isn’t something he’s going to fix when he’s inside an institution,” the judge said. “It’s something that he’s got to work on day in and day out for the rest of his life.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay