Colorado man gets life for kidnapping friends' toddler for porn

By Keith Coffman
DENVER, Oct 13 (Reuters) - A Colorado man convicted of
kidnapping a toddler from a couple he was staying with in
California and sexually abusing the child to produce pornography
that he shared online was sentenced to life in prison on
Tuesday, prosecutors said.
A federal jury found Shawn McCormack, 31, of Colorado
Springs guilty on four counts of sexual exploitation of a child
and two counts of kidnapping during a four-day trial in Fresno,
California, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement.
Senior U.S. District Court Judge Anthony W. Ishii presided
over those proceedings in April, urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL2N0X721P and on Tuesday he
imposed the sentence on McCormack, the statement said.
The trial heard how McCormack, under the pretense of
befriending the child's parents, stayed as an overnight guest on
multiple occasions at their home in Bakersfield, California.
Several times, the statement said, he snuck their toddler
out of the home in the middle of the night and recorded himself
sexually abusing the child at locations including his truck and
a nearby motel.
He then returned to the house before the couple awakened in
the morning, it said.
Leslie Caldwell, Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the
Justice Department's criminal division, called McCormack's
crimes "depraved ... the stuff of nightmares."
"While posing as a trusted friend and house guest, McCormack
kidnapped his hosts' toddler child and sexually abused the child
in local motels and parked cars," Caldwell said.
McCormack shared the pornographic images online, where they
were seen by an undercover investigator with the Toronto Police
Services, prosecutors said. McCormack also recorded and
distributed his sexual abuse of a second child, they said.
He was identified after Homeland Security Investigations
agents in Boston, while carrying out a forensic analysis of a
computer belonging to another person, viewed copies it held of
the recordings and images distributed by McCormack.
"After the agents identified the date, time and motel room
in which one of the videos had been produced, they learned that
McCormack had rented that motel room on the night when the
recording was created," prosecutors said.
U.S. Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner of the Eastern District of
California said McCormack's "vile and heart-breaking" acts might
have continued undetected for years, if not for the
"imaginative, dogged, and painstaking work" of investigators.