OAKLAND — A 66-year-old Wisconsin man has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for coaxing child pornography from a 7-year-old girl after reaching out to her on a messaging app, telling her “I love you,” and asking to be her boyfriend.
Darryl Badzinski was transferred Dec. 2 to the Bureau of Prisons system, and is currently serving his sentence at FCI Milan in Michigan. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to receipt of child pornography, and has a prior conviction for molesting a child that placed him in a sex offender registry at the time of the offense involving the 7-year-old.
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar handed down the sentence.
The victim had been using a Tango chat application set up by her mother so they could talk while she visited a loved one out-of-state. But Badzinski ended up messaging the girl, showing her pictures of himself masturbating and urinating, and asked her for pictures of her private parts. He described various sex acts he wanted to do in graphic detail, called her “honey buns,” and clicked on an ad for an apartment in the East Bay after learning that was where she lived, according to prosecutors.
During their chats, the girl sent Badzinski a map of her home, according to court records. He also allegedly talked about wanting to “be friends with your friends.”
In a sentencing memo asking for a 15-year prison term, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marja-Liisa Overbeck called the crime “extremely serious” and argued that anything less than 15 years “cannot guarantee” Badzinski won’t victimize another child. The defense asked for a five-year prison term.
“(The victim) will be faced with the trauma of recognizing that she was exploited as a very young girl, with memories of not only sending photographs of herself exposed and vulnerable, but of receiving photographs of a man more than eight times her age stroking himself, urinating, and generally engaging in crass behavior that was well beyond her ability to comprehend,” Overbeck wrote in a sentencing memo.
Badzinski’s attorneys filed a sentencing memo describing him as a “profoundly lonely man in crisis” after the recent death of his wife, and arguing that he was desperate for companionship. They say he wired thousands of dollars for mail-order brides who never materialized, and that his chats with the girl were similar to those with women he was speaking to around the same time. His attorneys say there was digital evidence the girl had been talking to other men and had already taken the picture of her private parts by the time Badzinski first messaged her.
“The evidence seized in this case makes the point: only two of the images found on his phone can be characterized as child pornography (both from the incident in question) because Mr. Badzinski was not on these apps for that kind of content or any related explicit conversations with minors,” the defense sentencing memo says.
Source: www.mercurynews.com