“And if not for the hard work of the members of the New York State Police and others mentioned, that [not ever having seen a case like this one] would still be true,” Yates County District Attorney and 10-year criminal prosecutor Todd Casella said, according to WHAM-TV.
Eighteen assorted child sex traffickers, rapists, child pornographers and pedophiles are behind bars today following a case the likes of which many seasoned law enforcement and prosecutorial professionals “have not seen.”
The investigation started with 49-year-old Andrew Daugherty of Dundee, New York, and spread throughout southern and western New York, with individuals charged from the towns of Elmira, Bath, Corning, Binghamton, Olean, Prattsburgh and Dundee. The sprawling investigation even leapfrogged down the coast, nabbing one suspect from Holly Hill, Florida, an eleven hundred mile drive away.
Daugherty is a registered sex offender and “faces the most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, predatory sexual assault against a child — both of which carry mandatory life sentences if convicted — as well as a sex trafficking of a child,” Casella said.
The list of those arrested and the charges they face is lengthy.
Of note is that eight of the seventeen suspects are female, or at least bear female names. Their felony charges range from Predatory Sexual Assault against a Child to Criminal Sexual Act 1st Degree to Sexual Abuse 1st Degree to Use of a Child in a Sexual Performance and Promoting a Sexual Performance by a Child.
Five suspects already have pleaded guilty.
The state police release said that the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in State Police Troops E, A, and C, the Holly Hill Police Department of Florida, the Yates County District Attorney’s Office, the Yates County Department of Social Services and the New York State Police Computer Crimes Unit worked together on the investigation.
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