Sex crimes alleged
Published Tuesday January 13th, 2009
Charges | Former bus driver's trial gets started in Burton
A woman testified Monday she saw images depicting what appeared to be nude teenage girls on a Fredericton man's computer, and his former roommates said teenage girls were coming and going from their apartments on a regular basis.
The trial of Kevin Shannon, 46, formerly of 46 Barton Cres., Apt. 7, got underway in Burton provincial court Monday.
Shannon - who worked as a Fredericton Transit bus driver at the time of the alleged offences - was first charged by city police with one Sept. 22, 2007, count of possession of child pornography.
A subsequent investigation led to further charges, including two counts of touching a young person for a sexual purpose while he was in a position of authority or trust, one count of making child pornography and one count of uttering threats to one of the alleged victims.
He was later charged with one count of breaching an order to have no unsupervised contact with children.
Shannon pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Melissa Arbeau testified Monday she was visiting a friend who was staying with Shannon on Sept. 22, 2007, when she saw questionable images on Shannon's computer. The pictures depicted what she believed to be naked, teenage girls, photographed from the neck down, Arbeau said.
Some of the photos featured explicit poses, she said, and she recognized Shannon's furniture in some of the photos, indicating they'd been taken in his apartment.
"You could tell it was the couch in his living room," she said.
To confirm that, Arbeau said, she examined a digital camera on Shannon's computer desk that same afternoon. She found all of the same pictures on the camera, she said.
The next day, Arbeau reported what she'd seen to the city police.
The friend Arbeau was visiting at Shannon's home that day - Heather Jo McCullogh - was a no-show in court Monday, despite having been served with a subpoena to testify.
Judge William McCarroll issued a warrant for her arrest for failing to appear as a Crown witness.
Arbeau said McCullogh - believed to reside in the Saint John area now - was staying with Shannon for a couple of days because she had nowhere to live at the time.
Two of Shannon's former roommates - former co-workers Robert Dassett and Michael Hood, who lived with Shannon at different times in recent years - testified Monday over the years they shared an apartment, Shannon would take in young women or girls.
"Kevin told me they were homeless and a lot of them were drug users," Dassett said, adding Shannon told him he took them in to help them out.
Dassett estimated that the various young women who stayed at the apartment to be 16 to 18 years of age. Hood said the girls appeared to him to be between 14 and 19 years old.
The longest any one of the women would stay there would be three weeks, Dassett said, while Hood said they'd be there no more than five days at a time.
The young women would sleep on a futon or couch in the living room.
They were occasionally left alone in the apartment when he and Shannon were at work, Dassett said.
Shannon never asked for anything from the young women in return for letting them stay there, he said.
Dassett said he saw one of the young women doing drugs at the apartment once.
"She was snorting something ... through a dollar bill," he said.
Hood said there were so many girls coming and going from the apartment that he eventually moved out.
There was too much traffic in the apartment, he said, and the girls there seemed young and he didn't want to be in that environment.
Monday's proceedings ended with a viewing of a video-recorded statement Shannon gave to a city police detective.
During the course of the police interview, Shannon told Det. Shawn Clark repeatedly that he didn't access or download child pornography despite Clark's contention an RCMP computer forensic expert found hundreds of images on his computer.
Shannon claimed many others had access to his computer, including former roommates.
"Honestly, I did not put those on my computer," he said during the Oct. 24, 2007, police interview.
In the statement, he said explicit pictures that he took personally were mainly of local prostitutes, whom he only photographed. He said he didn't have sex with them because he feared contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
Clark was the lead investigator on the file and arrested Shannon on Oct. 24, 2007, after a search uncovered numerous images of "obviously underage" girls on Shannon's computer, the detective testified.
The trial resumes today and is expected to run most of the week.
Shannon is being held in custody pending the outcome of the trial.
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Comments (20)
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"Also worth noting is that the age of consent at that time was 14, so unless he was distributing this (which hasn't been proven), it shoudn't even be illegal. This is sordid."
You're right about the age of consent, but in situations where the adult in question is in a position of trust or authority over a teen, even consensual sex is illegal. The judge overseeing this trial will determine if that's the case this time.
Furthermore, if an adult takes a naked/explicit photo of anyone under the age of 18, that is making child pornography, as per the Criminal Code of Canada. It's possible for the adult and minor in such a scenario to have legal sex, but photographing a minor in a sexual context is illegal.
I'm speaking here in general terms, as JustRight is correct that Shannon is innocent until proven guilty.
The reference to an image of child pornography featuring an infant came from a subsequent story on the trial.
Shannon's alleged to have possessed hundreds and hundreds of downloaded child porn from the Internet, and to have made handful of pictures of teenage girl(s).