Nicholas J. Veerkamp
A 30-year-old registered sex offender in Ohio was convicted by a federal jury on Thursday of sexually exploiting two children by taking explicit photos of them as they slept.
Nicholas J. Veerkamp of Colerain Township, which is within Hamilton County, Ohio, learned his fate in U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett’s courtroom in the Southern District of Ohio.
The verdict sheet shows that Veerkamp was found guilty of two child sexual exploitation crimes, a child pornography possession offense, and a count for committing an offense involving in a minor while being a registered sex offender.
Prosecutors said the victims were a 9-year-old girl and a 12-year-old. The trial lasted just four days, DOJ said in a press release.
“According to court documents and trial testimony, in August 2017, Veerkamp sexually exploited a 12-year-old victim to create three images of child pornography,” the DOJ said. “In October 2017, Veerkamp sexually exploited a 9-year-old child for the purpose of making child pornography. Veerkamp created 19 images of the victim, including images in which he exposed the child’s genitals while the victim slept.”
According to the complaint, which Law&Crime is not sharing because it could identify the girl identified only as Minor Victim A, said that Colerain Township Police Department received a report from a woman in November 2019 that her boyfriend had sexually explicit images of the victim on his laptop.
The woman reported that “Minor Victim A depicted in the photos is in the fourth grade.”
The woman “reported that the photos she observed on the laptop show Veerkamp’s hand holding down the pants of the child and taking a photo of her vagina while she slept,” the complaint said. “Another photo was of the breast area of the child.”
Nicholas Veerkamp
The woman said she reported the defendant to police when Veerkamp “told her he was going to babysit his friend’s kids at their home and that ‘set’ her off.”
The feds said that an ensuing search warrant found a “series of images” in a “private” folder that included “both explicit and non-explicit images of a prepubescent female who matched the likeness of the description of Minor Victim A.”
“The explicit images depicted Minor Victim A apparently asleep on a bed while a hand pulled down her pants and underwear to expose her genitals. Most of the images only depict the lower torso of Minor Victim A, to include her exposed genitals, and the hand of the other person,” the complaint said.
The defendant was also accused in a superseding indictment of sexually exploiting a 12-year-old, whom he did “knowingly employ, use, persuade, induce, entice and coerce” into “producing a visual depiction” of sexually explicit conduct.
Veerkamp, a registered sex offender for a crime against a child, was on probation following a 2016 sexual imposition conviction when he committed the crimes. Because of that he faces a decade’s worth of extra mandatory prison time. The defendant faces up to 60 years in prison for the child exploitation offenses, up to 20 years for the child pornography possession offense, plus a mandatory extra 10 years to be served consecutively for committing the crimes while being a registered sex offender, the DOJ said.
[Image via Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, Butler County Sheriff’s Office]