![['Summerside Provincial Courthouse.']](https://saltwire.imgix.net/summerside-courthouse-3149931.jpg?cs=srgb&fit=crop&h=568&w=847&dpr=1&auto=format%2Ccompress%2Cenhance)
A former Mount Pleasant man has pleaded guilty to one count of possessing a single video clip of child pornography and another count of accessing child pornography via a website.
Douglas William Preece, 62, pleaded guilty to the charges on June 12 and sentenced on July 25. He was ordered to serve a year in jail and three years of probation upon his release. He will also be added to the national sex offender registry, is restricted in his future interactions with people under the age of 16 and must submit a DNA sample to the national criminal database.
Preece first came to the attention of RCMP in September, 2017, after its Internet Child Exploitation unit, was contacted by police in Christiansburg, Virginia. That community’s Crime Against Children Unit was investigating a number of cases involving men arranging online to meet children for sexual encounters and one such suspect was believed to live in P.E.I.
An undercover operative with the U.S. police force, posing as an 11-year-old girl, had been engaged in an online chat with a man. During that chat, the man uploaded a video clip which showed a sexual act involving two young girls and a man. He claimed to be the man in the video and that one of the girls in the video was 12 years old.
Police in the U.S. subpoenaed the website where the chat took place to obtain the IP addresses of the computers involved, one of which came back as being from Preece’s account.
In the meantime, Preece also posted a phone number, which police tracked to the Wi-Fi at an address in Ellerslie-Bideford.
Preece was arrested in November.
When interviewed by RCMP, he denied ever having had sex with a child, despite what he’d claimed when chatting with the undercover operative.
Preece did not use a computer with a hard drive, using a tablet computer with a Google drive, instead.
The court also heard that since these charges were laid, Preece has lost his job and has had to move away from Mount Pleasant.
@JournalPMacLean
