Search for suspect spanned 2 continents

By Stuart Eskenazi and Michael Ko
Seattle Times staff reporters

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Two groups that work to stamp out child pornography on the Internet helped Pierce County investigators track down a foster father who police say posted sexually explicit photos of six young boys entrusted to his care.

The investigation began a couple of months ago, after the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Va., alerted local authorities about child pornography on Internet news groups that the group's analysts determined had been uploaded from the Tacoma area in September.

The center had learned about the postings from an anonymous tipster to its CyberTipline, an online and telephone service to encourage the reporting of suspected sexual exploitation of children.

Since the program began in March 1998, the CyberTipline has received more than 200,000 tips related to child pornography, including about 82,000 last year.

"We respond to every one of these reports, and as a result we view many images of child pornography," said Staca Urie, supervisor of the center's exploited-children unit. "These particular images jumped out at us because we had never seen them before."

Help fight child porn To report suspected cases of child pornography or other sexual exploitation of children, contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline at www.cybertipline.com or 800-843-5678. The phone line is staffed around the clock. Tips may be given anonymously.

Urie said center analysts at the time were unable to determine whether the images depicted the same victim.

The center analyzed a computer code appended to the postings, which came from an e-mail address alluding to the poster as a foster parent. They determined the user had accessed the Internet through a service provider in Tacoma. That's when the center contacted local authorities, launching the investigation three weeks ago through the Tacoma Police Department and Pierce County sheriff's data-recovery unit.

A break in the case occurred last week when a second tip came to the center, this one from the Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe (COPINE), a project based at a university in Cork, Ireland. COPINE analyzes images of child pornography to assist police investigations.

An arrest in England on child-pornography charges had led to the discovery of downloaded images on the suspect's computer. British police then shared the images with COPINE. Some of them appeared to have been shot in the United States and were unfamiliar to COPINE staffers, who contacted the center to see if it knew anything about the images.

It was then that the center tied about 100 images on the computer in England to the Internet images they had tracked to Pierce County. The additional images show other victims. Police investigators say some depict a man having intercourse with the boys.

They believe that man is Ronald Harold Young, the 41-year-old foster father from Key Peninsula charged yesterday with numerous sex crimes.

"We didn't know who he was or where we were going to go until two days ago," Tacoma Police Detective Richard Voce said yesterday.

Pierce County authorities served a search warrant on the Internet service provider that the center identified from the original tip, and obtained the user's account information. On Thursday morning, police arrested Young on his porch. Six boys were inside.

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com

Michael Ko: 206-515-5653 or mko@seattletimes.com

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