On a hard drive that was confiscated on February 27, 2023, a former Orange County teacher kept three images and three videos of minors under 12 years old, whom he recorded in a school bathroom.
For these crimes, Siu Kong Sit, 38, of Rowland Heights, was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison.
According to the federal indictment against him, the high school teacher secretly installed hidden cameras in the school’s bathrooms and elsewhere on campus and, over a three-year period, viewed and downloaded hundreds of images, including of children under 12.
Siu Kong Sit pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse material. He was sentenced by United States District Judge John W. Holcomb, who ordered Sit placed on lifetime supervised release following his eventual release from prison and scheduled a restitution hearing for September 8. November.
Sit pleaded guilty on March 29 to one count of possession of child pornography.
“This defendant was every parent’s nightmare, who, instead of worrying about the safety and well-being of the students, exploited them in the most abhorrent way,” said federal prosecutor Martín Estrada.
“It is important that we send a strong message of zero tolerance towards those who take advantage of children. “My office will continue to prosecute criminals who prey on our youth to the fullest extent of the law.”
According to Sit’s plea agreement, at least since February 2020, when he was working as a teacher at Beckman High School in Irvine, he began secretly installing hidden cameras in bathrooms located on campus.
After installing the cameras, Sit periodically reviewed the videos captured by the cameras and downloaded those that were of interest to him.
In May 2022, while serving as a coach for the high school robotics team, Sit placed a hidden camera in the bathroom of a hotel room where junior students on the robotics team were staying during a tournament in Texas.
Between 2020 and 2023, Sit viewed and downloaded hundreds of images of children and adults, in various states of undress, using the bathroom.
After the cameras were discovered, in February 2023, law enforcement confiscated several digital devices from the home of Sit, who owned and was the sole user of all the devices.
Police also confiscated two external storage drives for cameras that the defendant had secretly installed at Beckman High School in the city of Irvine.
A forensic review of the various digital devices identified dozens of images and videos of child pornography, including images and videos that Sit had recorded himself of children using the bathrooms and in various states of undress.
The victims Sit recorded without their consent were under 18 years old and some of the victims were under 12 years old.
A search of a hard drive owned by Sit resulted in the seizure of at least 22 images and one Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) video, including several showing a young child engaging in sexual activity.
The search of a separate hard drive owned by the sexual predator contained at least 150 images and four videos of CSAM.
In his plea agreement, Sit admitted knowingly possessing images and videos of minors under the age of 12 engaging in sexual conduct.
Separately, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office has filed criminal charges against Sit in Orange County Superior Court in connection with the adult victims in the hidden videos matter.
Charges filed in state court in connection with Sit’s minor victims were dismissed so the federal case could proceed.
Guilty of child pornography
Mark Phillip Oster, a former Orange County football coach and referee, pleaded guilty in federal court in Los Angeles to child pornography.
Oster, 64, an American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) coach, pleaded guilty to a federal charge, admitting that he hid a camera in a location where he knew an underage girl in his care was hiding. would strip and persuaded a second girl from a foreign country to send him nude photos of herself.
Mark Phillip Oster, who served as a referee and coach from 2015 to 2021 at a Huntington Beach high school, pleaded guilty in federal court in Los Angeles to a single count of producing child pornography. He will be sentenced Nov. 25 and faces a likely sentence of 15 to 30 years behind bars, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
In his plea agreement, Oster admitted to posting images of child pornography to a dark web website dedicated to sharing images and videos of child pornography and discussing child sexual abuse.
On the site, the accused man shared his knowledge of what child pornography is produced in the Philippines, and explained how the sexual exploitation of children operates in Southeast Asia.
Authorities also discovered that the defendant had shared child pornography on Facebook and Skype and stored child pornography on his Google Photos account.
Likewise, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized hard drives in his home, in March and August 2021, which contained numerous images of child pornography that he produced with the girl who was in his care, and that in At that time I was less than 12 years old.
Additionally, throughout 2020 and into July 2021, Oster produced child pornography by “luring, persuading and directing” a second girl, who was about 13 years old and living outside the United States, to take photographs of herself. , naked, and sent them to Oster, according to the federal prosecutor’s office, led by Andrew Beshai of the Santa Ana branch and trial attorney Kyle Reynolds of the Department of Justice’s Obscenity and Child Exploitation Section, who are in charge of the accusation in this case.
Oster admitted to having also “persuaded and seduced” the victim’s mother, who took photographs of her daughter’s body. In exchange for the photographs, Oster sent money and gifts to the girl and her mother.
“The girl was vulnerable due to her poverty,” federal prosecutors said.
What goes through the minds of criminals?
Dr. Eduardo López Navarro, executive director of “Entre Amigos Human Services”, in the city of El Monte, analyzed that in the cases of former high school teachers who possessed explicit child pornography material, and who installed hidden cameras to spy on and record to girls, “many of these people were sexually abused when they were children.”
“They generally attack children around the age when they suffered the abuse; They are attracted to children, that is, if they are taking photos of children aged 5 to 6, it is around their time, when they were abused,” López Navarro declared to La Opinión. “Then they lose control.”
López Navarro, host of the radio program, La Red Hispana and psychotherapist, said that, in the perpetrators of these behaviors with children “more or less the strange way to understand their behavior, is that they try to regain control of their lives. , becoming victimizers.”
“There are some people who are very insecure about their body, their sexuality and they are more attracted to children, because children have no way to say I don’t like you, they are small and can be manipulated,” he said. “Children who are their victims are easier to convince.”
“Children lack the communication skills of an adult, when it comes to a ritual of conquest or having a relationship with an adult,” he added. “They don’t have the maturity for these types of relationships and usually because (sexual predators) remember what was lost through abuse during their childhood.”
The mental health expert stressed that adult abusers are only repeating the criminal behavior of those who caused them harm and caused trauma for the rest of their lives.
“Many of them act like this, because they finally stopped being victims, by becoming victimizers,” said López Navarro.
