Crime & Safety

Child Porn Plea Means Prison for Voorhees Man, AG Says

Daniel Allen Jr. also faces parole supervision for life and will be added to the Megan's Law list, authorities said.

A Voorhees man who distributed a massive cache of child pornography faces seven years in state prison after pleading guilty to multiple charges, acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman announced Tuesday.

Daniel Allen Jr., 23, had a stash of about 15,000 still photos and 200 videos, including depictions of child rape, when he was arrested just over a year ago, authorities said, and spread at least 1,000 photos of two young girls, requesting they be Photoshopped into child porn, via an unnamed foreign website.

Facing numerous counts, Allen pleaded guilty Monday before Superior Court Judge Michael J. Kassel in Camden County to second-degree solicitation of the manufacture of child pornography, second-degree distribution of child pornography and third-degree endangering the welfare of a child.

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Allen must register as a sex offender under Megan’s Law and will be subject to parole supervision for life, per the terms of the plea deal, and will be sentenced on Dec. 13.

“Demand for child pornography directly drives the sexual abuse of children,” Hoffman said in a statement. “That is why these cases are such a priority for us, and why the refrain that simply viewing child pornography online is a victimless crime is as offensive as it is misguided. The users who share these perverse materials motivate the suppliers who produce them, and their use is often part of a continuum of deviant behavior that can lead to sexual assaults against children, as we have seen with some of the leads produced in this case.”

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When Allen was arrested at his Shingle Oak Drive home on Aug. 11, 2012, he had been posting hundreds of photos of the same two girls, both under the age of 13, to a child porn trading website, authorities said, requesting other users combine the clothed photos of the two girls with pornographic shots. Emails on Allen’s laptop, which was seized in the investigation, showed he’d both traded child porn and received digitally altered photos depicting the girls in pornographic situations.

Concern for those girls’ safety drove authorities to identify and arrest Allen and protect the girls, Hoffman said.

“When investigators learned that Allen was exploiting two young girls and exposing them to harm on the Internet, they moved swiftly to arrest him and protect the victims,” said Elie Honig, director of the Division of Criminal Justice. “Meanwhile, we continued to pursue leads related to the foreign website Allen was using and pedophiles who communicated with him.

“We want anyone who shares child pornography on the Internet to know that we have the technology to detect them, and when we do, we’ll prosecute them to the full extent of the law.”

The investigation continued even after Allen’s arrest, and authorities said it’s so far produced 60 leads in the United States and 40 leads internationally, and provided evidence in nine other cases in North America where men who had contact with Allen were arrested independently.

Six men have been arrested in the last year, including Williamstown resident Todd Gregory Nichols, 43, who faces charges of both possession and distribution of child pornography after authorities said he sent child porn to Allen’s email address.

The other arrests happened as far away as Wyoming, and involved men who either traded child porn with Allen or used the same website as he did, authorities said.


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