Officer Held on Charges of Child Sex

A Riverside police officer and former substitute teacher was arrested Tuesday by FBI agents and charged in federal court with traveling from California to Wisconsin to have sex with a boy.

According to an affidavit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Green Bay, Wis., Adam James Brown, 31, flew to Madison in October 2002, where he met William N. Martin, 32, and traveled with him to Beaver Dam, Wis.

Over two days, the pair took five boys, ages 8 to 11, to a local motel and to a resort in nearby Wisconsin Dells, where Brown touched the boys’ genitalia and engaged in both oral and anal sex with some of the children, according to videotaped interviews with the victims. Brown also took photographs of two of the children wrestling naked, according to the interviews.

A sixth boy told investigators that Brown made a second trip to Beaver Dam in early 2003.

Brown, a six-year veteran of the Riverside Police Department, was arrested Tuesday morning at the central police station after agents from the FBI’s Innocent Images Task Force, a unit dedicated to investigating Internet-based child pornography, searched his home.

He was charged with a single count of crossing state boundaries to engage in sex with a minor; if convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison, said Sharon Slattery, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent. Additional charges may be filed as investigators interview more children, she said.

Tuesday afternoon, Brown, a tall, muscular man with thinning brown hair, appeared in Magistrate Court in downtown Los Angeles, where a detention hearing was set for Feb. 18.

Steve Bauer, the Dodge County, Wis., district attorney, has also filed a state charge of sexual assault on a minor in Beaver Dam.

Investigators believe that Brown and Martin met through the Internet. Martin, a resident of Beaver Dam, was arrested by the FBI in January on suspicion of enticing children into performing sexual acts and selling the pornographic recordings over the Internet. He is facing federal charges in Wisconsin.

According to Bauer, most of the children interviewed said they first met Martin in late summer 2002. One of his methods for meeting children, Bauer said, involved setting up a stand at the county fair.

“He’d just be selling stuff, trinkets of some sort,” Bauer said, though he added that investigators were not sure how Martin allegedly lured the boys back to his home.

FBI officials in Wisconsin said that Martin also preyed upon children from single-parent homes, offering to baby-sit the boys so their parents could enjoy free time.

Thirty children ages 7 to 15 have alleged that they were involved in Martin’s scheme, said Monica Shipley, an FBI spokesperson in Milwaukee.

Brown was identified by investigators after they searched Martin’s house and allegedly found a letter he had sent to Martin.

Three other men in Wisconsin and one in Michigan have also been arrested in connection with Martin’s alleged pornography operation. The FBI’s Slattery said that all four men, along with Brown, acted as Martin’s clients rather than as co-producers of Internet pornography.

An additional seven men in Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois are also under investigation for alleged involvement with Martin, Slattery said.

Brown, who was assigned to the Riverside Police Department’s field operations division as a patrol officer, resigned after his arrest.

Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach said Brown had previously been assigned to the Ramona High School Wellness Center as a youth resource officer from July 2000 to April 2003.

Before becoming a police officer, Brown worked as a substitute teacher at Wells Intermediate School during the 1996-97 academic year.

Leach asked that anyone with information about potential victims contact Riverside Police Sgt. John Capen at (909) 320-8076 or the Riverside FBI office at (909) 686-0335.