BUFFALO, NY — A Buffalo man is sentenced to 168 months incarceration following an investigation and subsequent arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Buffalo.
Daniel Huzinec, 26, of Buffalo, NY was convicted of receipt of child pornography after sharing photographs of male children engaged in sexually explicit conduct on a peer-to-peer website.
“This individual violated his position of trust with the Boy Scouts to exploit and take advantage of young boys under his supervision,” said Kevin Kelly, special agent in charge of HSI Buffalo. “The exploitation of children is reprehensible, and HSI has teams dedicated to these types of investigations to ensure that we locate and arrest child predators and bring them to justice.”
According to court documents out of the Western District of New York, on January 27, 2015, special agents from HSI Buffalo executed a search warrant at the defendant’s residence in South Buffalo. Numerous items were seized from the residence including a laptop computer. During the execution of the warrant, the defendant, an Assistant Scout Master, waived his Miranda rights and admitted that in January 2015, while chaperoning a Boy Scout camping trip, he took several sexually explicit pictures of a sleeping 16-year-old boy with his cell phone.
A subsequent forensic evaluation of the electronic evidence seized from the defendant’s residence determined that such evidence contained images and videos of child pornography, including the sexually explicit pictures of the sleeping child that the defendant had admitted to taking. Law enforcement officers also discovered that Huzinec produced child pornography of another boy. Specifically, in November 2014, Huzinec enticed a 15-year-old boy, a former member of the defendant’s Boy Scout troop, to send him sexually explicit pictures by creating a fake email account and posing as a teenage girl. Those pictures were also found on the defendant’s computer.
This investigation was conducted under HSI’s Operation Predator, an international initiative to protect children from sexual predators. Since the launch of Operation Predator in 2003, HSI has arrested more than 16,000 individuals for crimes against children, including the production and distribution of online child pornography, traveling overseas for sex with minors, and sex trafficking of children. In fiscal year 2016, more than 2,600 child predators were arrested by HSI special agents under this initiative and more than 800 victims identified or rescued.
