Crown seeks six years for child pornographer

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This article was published 01/08/2017 (3000 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before a child pornography investigation began into a Winnipeg educational assistant and magician, his habit of using a cellphone to record videos of children on school grounds had been reported to school officials, court heard Tuesday.

Daniel Kamenicky previously pleaded guilty to one count each of making and possessing child pornography after police investigators discovered 33 videos he had taken of young girls in public places over a period of at least three years. The faces of at least 24 little girls were shown in the videos, and nine of those girls were identified after police consulted with principals at the two elementary schools where Kamenicky was previously employed as a teacher’s aide — Windsor School and Marion School.

Many of the recordings were up-skirt shots that zoomed in on the girls’ genitals, so investigators couldn’t tell how many victims were involved or their exact ages at the time of the recording. The majority of the identified girls were 10 years old when Kamenicky was arrested and were thought to have been much younger when they were unknowingly recorded. The surreptitious videos were taken on school playgrounds, in a classroom, a gymnasium change room, at a water park, and in other public places such as stores and restaurants.

Several of the videos were uploaded to Kamenicky’s Flickr account last summer, prompting internet services provider Yahoo!, which owns the photo-sharing site, to contact police with Kamenicky’s unique internet-protocol address.

Investigators believe the mass upload was automatic and accidental, triggered when Kamenicky got a new smartphone last summer. He’s been in custody since his arrest, after police searched his home and electronic devices, where they also found other child pornography images and videos that Kamenicky had downloaded from the internet. A sampling of the videos Kamenicky created himself — as well as ones that were found downloaded on his computer — were played in court Tuesday. In some of his recordings, music with a pulsing beat and provocative lyrics had been added, and in others he can be heard instructing the girls on how to pose as they were doing gymnastics moves, playing on monkey bars or sitting back on a bench. The girls didn’t know they were being recorded and Kamenicky is not accused of assaulting them.

In one of the videos, he told a girl to stand over a vent to feel warm air and used his “knowledge of magic to distract her,” as he got the shot he wanted, Crown prosecutor Shannon Benevides told court.

Benevides is seeking a six-year sentence, arguing Kamenicky entered his guilty plea to only two charges before all of the victims could be identified and may have faced a lengthier prison term otherwise.

The children were “used as props,” by someone they trusted in a place they should’ve been safe, Benevides said.

“If you can’t send your children to school to be safe, where can you send them?” she said, noting news of the case sparked panic for many parents who had come into contact with Kamenicky through his work at the schools and magic shows.

He faces a minimum one-year sentence on each count. A new date for the continuation of the sentencing hearing still needs to be arranged so defence lawyer Dan Manning can make his submissions to provincial court Judge Sidney Lerner, but Manning told the Free Press he expects to ask for a sentence much closer to the minimum total of two years. Manning said his client is remorseful and is looking forward to the opportunity to work out his issues in counselling once he starts serving his sentence.

“He’s been obviously devastated by the charges,” Manning said. “He’s lost everything.”

Kamenicky, who was known as Dan the Magic Man for his work as a children’s magician, worked as an educational assistant for Windsor School within the Louis Riel School Division at the time of his arrest in August 2016 and was also a respite worker for people with disabilities. He had worked at the school for three years, court heard, and during that time a fellow teacher’s aide noticed Kamenicky recording children openly and in secret. She told police she had reported his behaviour to school staff several times, and had brought it to the principal’s attention three times.

A representative of the Louis Riel School Division could not immediately be reached for comment.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay