Longmont man in online sexual predator incident…
Longmont man in online sexual predator incident pleads guilty
Brandt Owen Deboard
By John Aguilar |
A Longmont man accused of entering an online chat room to solicit sex with a mother and her 6-year-old daughter pleaded guilty Friday to a charge of attempted sexual assault on a child.
Brandt Owen Deboard, 31, could receive probation or up to three years in prison on the felony charge.
He is scheduled to be sentenced May 21. Additional drug charges he faced were dropped as part of the plea bargain.
Deboard was arrested in a sting operation at a Longmont hotel last April after he went there thinking he was meeting up with a single mother and her young daughter for a sexual liaison, police said.
The woman at the hotel was actually an undercover detective. In the adjoining room, a team of law enforcement officials waited to arrest Deboard.
Prosecutor Tim Johnson said Deboard first came to the attention of authorities early last year when he entered an Internet chat room and inquired if any women with children were up for a sexual encounter.
A woman in Colorado Springs who was in the chat room complained to police about the offer, Johnson said.
An Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in Colorado Springs used an undercover detective, with the alias Kayla Williams, as part of an effort to see if Deboard would proposition again.
Longmont police said he did. They described the online conversation that led to Deboard's arrest as "very spooky" and unusually brazen.
"He was on the Internet looking to hook up with mothers and children," Longmont police commander Tim Lewis told the Camera last year. "He had explicit discussions with the mother about what he wanted to do with her 6-year-old daughter."
The undercover detective sent Deboard a phony picture of herself while Deboard sent her his actual photo. Then they arranged the April 16 rendezvous at the Longmont hotel.
"This issue of Internet propositioning is very common in Colorado," Johnson said. "But there are units across the state dedicated to finding these people."
Deboard will remain in custody at the Boulder County Jail until his sentencing.
John Aguilar