A Brooklyn federal jury found an NYPD cop guilty Wednesday of four charges related to child pornography and sexual exploitation of children.
Timothy Martinez, 43, a 17-year NYPD veteran, was convicted of two counts of child sexual exploitation and one count each of attempted receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography.
He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years at a sentencing hearing now scheduled for September. He remains under home confinement as a condition of his bail.
”Instead of using his position as a member of the NYPD to protect children, he shamefully gained the trust of minors in order to sexually exploit them,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
Martinez was arrested in 2020, after a search of his Staten Island home uncovered a laptop teeming with child porn images, and logs of video chats with two underage girls.
Prosecutors alleged that Martinez also reached out to a Twitter user he believed was an underage girl selling child pornography and bought explicit images.
They also said that Martinez chatted up the underage girls for years, persuading them to record themselves performing lewd acts. Both of them took the stand during the one-week trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.
One of the teens testified that she met Martinez using a Web site called Omegle, where people can find strangers to chat with, then started corresponding with him on Skype, both in text and on video.
She was on the verge of turning 13, looking for someone to talk about how she was abused and molested by her father, and she opened up to Martinez, she said.
“I didn’t have anyone to talk to, like I said, so I pretty much laid everything out on the line,” said the witness, who was identified in court as “Jane Doe No. 2.”
“I told him stuff that I actually didn’t tell my mother or any of my family or even my significant other till the other day,” she said.
She testified that she recognized his voice during audio conversations,…
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