Posted on 12/07/2007 12:22:51 AM PST by Gondring
Clay (WSYR-TV) - NewsChannel 9 broke news out of the town of Clay Thursday that a Cicero-North Syracuse High School has been charged with distributing nude pictures of female students.
The charges stem from cell phone pictures that about a dozen high school girls, age 11 to 14, took of themselves. They sent the naked pictures to their boyfriends and that's when police say the criminal activity happened.
District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick says the only person charged is 17-year-old Michael Wixson, an honor roll student at C-NS High School.
Thursday, he was arraigned in town of Clay court on charges of endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, and disseminating indecent materials, a felony. His lawyer told us that Wixson is a "good kid".
Wixson is the one who elevated this from immature, unhealthy behavior of sharing inappropriate pictures, to criminal activity when the pictures were distributed to a minor.
The DA says this all began 2-3 years ago, when the girls took nude pictures of themselves and sent the photos to their boyfriends at the time.
After those relationships ended, the boys put the pictures onto a disc, according to the DA. The dics were being sold at school, but the sale was stopped by school officials. The photos also ended up on an “offensive website” titled “Girls Gone Wild at C-NS,” which has been taken down.
The investigation began, leading State Police to Wixson and his computer to find the original images. He is charged because the crime was in distributing the pictures to a 15-year-old girl in July. It happened at 7775 New Hope East Road in Liverpool.
The DA says pictures have made it to the web and flickr.com, a photo sharing site, and they are still investigating how they made it online from the discs or a computer.
Fitzpatrick says this case is getting prosecuted because of the number of kids involved.
He says some parents of the young female victims didn't want to take this investigation seriously.
“Some of them were furious. A good percentage of them were, ‘stuff happens, what are you going to do?’ and don't want to cooperate and don't want to be interviewed, which, to me, is mind-boggling.”
What's also disturbing for the investigators is how a dozen girls, some as young as 11, could so easily snap salacious pictures and feel comfortable messaging them to teenage boys.
“When you take that picture and you think you sent it to someone, you could have sent it to most of the civilized world.”
The internet has taken this inappropriate sharing of homemade porn to the next, criminal level. Now, whomever put the pictures on the internet could face charges for publishing without the girls' consent.
“How would you like to be in your 20s, 30s and have someone say ‘oh geez I saw you on the web.’ It's disgusting. It’s not only boorish, ungentlemanly behavior, it's criminal.”
The principal at Cicero-North Syracuse says he became aware of the investigation a year and a half ago, when the disc with the nude photos started circulating around the junior high school.
Students were suspended at that time. The police probe continued as the pictures made it to the internet. This whole issue of cyber safety and security has become very high profile at C-NS.
Kids take and send pictures with cell phones all the time. Never guessing where they might end up.
Assistant DA Gary Dawson heads the special victims unit. Last week, ironically, he brought this powerful PowerPoint presentation to C-NS.
“When you put something out there on the internet, you may think that it's just there for your friends. But it's out there forever. For anyone who wants to get to it,” he told students.
Whether its webcam or cell phone, girls sending pictures of themselves to boyfriends can be a very bad idea.
Dawson said, “They split up, guess who gets those pictures? And if it's a bad break up, guess what happens to the pictures?
“If you're posting your picture online, if it's ok with you that a 50-year-old guy in Michigan is cutting and pasting your picture and getting off, that's what can happen.”
The high schoolers sat speechless as they watched a video vignette showing the consequences of a careless posting.
Jim Froio is the principal at C-NS. “The message here is clear. That kids who experiment with the internet must be careful, and it must be something that parents are aware of. Even kids who do things on YouTube for fun, is the license plate showing in the movie that you made? All of those things that we never had to think about. Now, we have to think about it, because there are people out there who will take advantage of those things.”
Froio says if kids need to know if they make a mistake on the internet, with a private posting, that mistake can stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Thursday night, we spoke with people in and around the C-NS community who were shocked to hear what investigators are uncovering.
Sam Fanizzi remembers the DVD circulating at C-NS. Some of his friends were in the pictures.
“They were pretty mad about it, yeah, but after that we didn't hear too much more.”
Now we're hearing a lot. After some of those pictures were allegedly posted on the web and also emailed to a 15-year-old girl, the district attorney stepped in.
Greg Shelton, who has an 11-year-old daughter said, “I would want to know why she did it in the first place so I could counsel her but I would be devastated if I saw her nude on the internet I wouldn't know what to think, it would really be shocking.”
He says parents should use what's come out of this investigation as a lesson, to take a more proactive approach.
“I think you should be talking with kids, know what they're into or friends they've got so you can try to keep something like that from happening.”
But Sam Fanizzi says he's not sure students will stop. “I don't think as many kids take it as a lesson that should, ‘cuz people are still gonna think it's not gonna happen to me or whatever.”
But it amazes me how many parents fail to realize their own daughters are doing such things. I guess they figure it's only other peoples' kids doing this stuff, without realizing their own kids at that age are trying desperately to fit in...plus, to get boys' attention.
I hope that America wakes up soon and realizes how far we've fallen, and how each new generation is pushing things further. Maybe we'll see some concern if we someday get a search engine that's geared toward finding old online nekkid pics of your boss or something.
Wait a minute. Since when are 11 to 14 year olds in high school? Isn't that middle school age?
It is becoming harder and harder for someone my age to find a classy woman.
classic ban trap :)
I hate to say it, but why are girls this stupid. We males run the internet to share pictures of them with each other. That’s what Algore had in mind.
Just don’t provide the content :)
Jeremiah 23
13 And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria; they prophesied in Baal, and caused my people Israel to err.
14 I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness; they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.
15 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts concerning the prophets; Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall: for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the land.
11? WTF, that’s just sick. Something is very wrong on all sides here.
Kids are stupid, Lord knows I was when I was a kid, but this is beyond weird. Taking nude photos of themselves and sending them to their boyfriends... they might as well have cut out the boyfriends and posted them directly to a porno site.
Nothing like that stays secret once it's on the web. And once it's out into cyberspace, it's out for good.
They completely undermined the much later portion of the story where they attempted to say it was bad for the girls to have done this because those awful boys would share the photos. Of course, their spin was it was the boys, not the girl photographers who were entirely at fault here.
I think the girls should also be charged for trafficking in kiddie porn not portrayed as sweet, innocent victims.
My other reaction was the urge to lock the all my cameras in the gun safe. No computer camera, no cell camera.
What are the moms of these girls teaching them? Why do these kids have so little self respect for themselves? I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising when we read of a mother who sets up an Internet persona in order to torment an ex-friend of her young daughter’s. It’s very disheartening to read stories like this which, once upon a time seemed to be the exception, but now perhaps are becoming the norm.
I don't care what a child psychologist or export might try to sell me. I don't expect I could be convinced these girls didn't know this was wrong on some level, i.e. not something they'd tell their parents about.
Obviously I wonder where this idea got into their heads to willfully sexualize themselves so young. I'll say this: the culture's sure changed a lot since I was 11-14. We did have an incident of one particular troublesome male student who was caught with printed adult material. A big deal was made out of it. Even that behavior, arguably "normal" curiosity, isn't close to the same as exploitatively posing yourself!
Boy howdy I'll tell ya! This sort of stuff just didn't happen when I was in high school in the late 70's. My wife works at a major retail department store at the local mall. Although I avoid the mall like the plague, she's been telling me more and more about how all the young girls nowadays dress and act like tramps. Many of them are also, um, er, shall we say rotund, but still try to show off as much skin as they can. She even tells me she's seen young girls, probably 12-13 with tattoos. Makes me wonder how much farther into the gutter our culture will go before it reverses course....
What age are you,if you don’t mind me asking?If under 30,then you have a long search ahead of you.
As Special Prosecutor on this important case I will have to review each and every offending photo. Please submit them in a plain envelope.
It is becoming harder and harder for someone my age to find a classy woman
How old are you? 12.
I'm starting to get an idea of how these girls did something so stupid.
You might want to hit the abuse button on yourself and get the mod to delete that comment, that you should be ashamed of making ,since you are talking about nude photos of 11 to 14 year old girls.
Around where I live, if you disqualify the ones with tattoos there isn't much left.
Somehow it’s against the law for a 17 year old male to distribute the photos (and it should be), yet it wasn’t against the law for the girls themselves to distribute them to minors? The laws in this country are just not equitable.
It seems that picking this one kid out of the group is a bit of a selective prosecution. But then Fitzpatrick has always been a media-whoring jerk anyway.
Must be some real proud dads in that town. /sarc
My interpretation is that they were 11-14 when the pictures were taken, 2-3 years ago and they are now in high school.
Duh. Fast forward 50 years....Grandma, is that you playing show and tell?
"Show business kids takin pictures of themselves
And they don't give a f__ __ __ about anybody else"
In the days before digital photgraphy this kind of stuff didn’t happen unless the youngster had their own darkroom. I mean seriously, can you imagine taking the film out of the brownie down to the corner drug store...
Even with the ease in which it’s done now — !11?? What happened to morality? What happened to self respect? Do moms and dads even TALK to these kids?
To hell in a hand basket I tell ya.
Sounds to me like he wants those photos so that he can hit the abuse button....
There is a fine line between being embarrassed by this sort of stuff, and self promotion. If you are running for president, you would likely be embarrassed, but celebrities these days are releasing sex tapes of themselves on purpose, just to become more famous. There really isn’t the type of shunning or social embarrassment for them that might have happened in the past.
It’s a strange new world we are living in. In fifty years, if you find nude photos of your boss on line, the question of if she is embarrassed or not might hinge on whether or not she looks good in the photos.
Back when I was teaching, I often wondered what would happen if a group of 16-17 year olds took pornographic pictures and movies of each other and sold them, marketing exclusively to other under-18 teens. (Not that they were too far off from that already at the dances and events that I saw at our middle school.)
I didn’t understand that point. If it was illegal for someone to send the pictures to a 15-year-old girl, how was it legal to send the pictures to what i presume were 11-14-year-old boys?
It probably is legal to take naked pictures of yourself. But it is a crime to send them to minors, and that should be true even if you are a minor yourself, or the pictures are of yourself?
Anybody want to bet that if a 14-year-old-boy took naked pictures of himself and e-mailed them to all the 14-year-old-girls in his school, he’d be arrested?
“How old are you? 12.”
lol... I think it has always been impossible for 12 year olds to find classy women. That hasn’t changed.
People are ALWAYS making bad snap decisions. It used to be that most of those bad snap decisions were pretty much private, becuase it would take planning and work to make it public.
Now the internet and digital capture makes it possible that ANY snap decision a person makes can well be known to the world within a few minutes.
For example, George Allen was certainly not the first politician to say something stupid. Years ago you might have heard a report about it, people would be debating what words were actually used, there’d be an apology and people would move on.
Now you can say one stupid thing in 15 years and be destroyed (Don Imus anyone?)
I’m not surprised that you could get young girls to do something stupid for 30 seconds. Girls Gone Wild is a multi-million-dollar business based on the simple premise that with a little money and a lot of persuasion you can talk a LOT of girls into a moment of insanity — and these are much older women who should know better.
If your going to be dumb, you’d better be tough.
And these young girls are incredibly DUMB.
I agree, and in all honesty, it has been a very long time since I was that age, and of course I was never presented with the same kind of "instant stupidity" that is available to the youths of today. I was no angel growing up and involved myself in some pretty stupid things. But there is no record of those things today :)
For the record, I have a 17 year old daughter who has had access to the internet since she was very young. We (actually, the Mrs.) took the time to see what she was up to. To this day, we still control her internet access, but that is more to keep her grades in-line than to prevent her from exposing herself. After some of the horror stories we have read regarding behavior and predators on the net, we consider ourselves lucky - VERY lucky.
Thank God.
You've got that right...We say that our society is heading in a downward spiral but the PARENTS are the ones who need to take responsibility. Teach your children the right values and morals and things generally don't get out of hand like this. If this kid was a pretty good kid as his lawyer says, why was he setting up a website and why was he holding on to those discs?... my kids are 13-11 now and he/she wants a cell phone (not gonna happen yet).
Dude,not a very bright comment on your part...wrong on all levels.
I am 22, and can tell you that I may know of only 5 girls my age that I would consider relationship material.
No, but the trend is apparent, being a college student I can say the trash outweighs the class by a margin of 10 to 1
It’s a joke moron!
Looks as though a couple of us “morons” didn’t get the joke then...no reason to name call by the way. Just explain your poor attempt at a joke. No big deal...
this happened about 10minutes away from my house. I cannot believe girls that young would send pics like that to their boyfriend.
But what I dont get is how or why they charged this kid but not anyone else? not even the ones who sold it at school. this whole case is disturbing.
You're reading his comment like a leftie and ignoring the importance of commas. Just like the Second Amendment's comma structure shows that it refers to an individual right, the lack of a comma in Doc Savage's comment shows that he was not referring to the reader.
In fact, when you add in his failure to use a smiley emoticon or sarcasm tag, it's clear that he was referring to himself as "a joke moron"...so don't be so touchy!
:-)
The girls took the pics in middle school.......they are NOW in high school and it’s still haunting them. Read the article.
Sadly, I no longer believe that America can wake up....it is so far off the course; the only miracle I see in the future is Christ's return. When that happens, ALL the believers will be taken with Him. And I can't even imagine what America will become like after that!
WHY does an 11 year old have a cell phone that take pictures? IF they have a cell at all it should be a trac phone or some such thing so that they can reach their parents. But a photo taking cell phone? Parents beware.
To charge someone, they have to have enough evidence to make the charges stick.
A computer with images on it/left on it provides evidence. I doubt that students kept accounting records of sales, so there will be no paperwork trail mentioning names or types of images sold on discs.
The DA can sometimes only do so much without the evidence.
Prosecuting the one boy may lead to other provable charges against others involved. But, for now, they only have a boy who has the evidence necessary (his own personal computer) for prosecution.
Yeah, we’ve heard of him down here. He was involved in one notorious case that got overturned.
You are a member of this community and your post reflects extremely poorly on us by association
I miss it up there. I'm in exile, chased away by the draconian laws and excessive taxation (i.e., stunted economy). :-(
But what I dont get is how or why they charged this kid but not anyone else? not even the ones who sold it at school. this whole case is disturbing.
And were the boyfriends minors? Is there anything against a minor transmitting her own pics to another minor?
Was it Michael Wixson who created “Girls Gone Wild at C-NS,” or someone else (there would be computer evidence there, too)...perhaps that's one thing the DA is "still investigating."
I wouldn't doubt that they are. As far as prosecuting minors....I think that's difficult for this type of thing. Taking pictures of themselves (nude or otherwise) as far as I know is not a crime. I think sending nude pictures to another minor should rise to the specter of breaking a decency law....but, if it's sent by a minor, again, I don't know if current laws account for that. (I haven't read the criminal laws on transmission of "pornographic materials" BY minors.
Really, they don’t need to have ANY evidence, or even a genuine, statutory crime, to charge someone. They do need evidence to get a conviction, however, IF the accused has a decent lawyer.
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