Hurricane man arrested after agents allegedly find videos depicting rape of children on cell phone

Stock image from 2016 | St. George News

ST. GEORGE — A Hurricane man is in jail after task force agents for the Utah Attorney General’s Office served a search warrant on the suspect’s home, where they reportedly found videos of girls as young as 6 being sexually abused and raped by adults.

ICAC Task Force. SECURE Strike Force, location and date unspecified | Image courtesy of Utah Attorney General’s Office, St. George News

On Thursday, Nicholas David Kane, 32, was arrested and booked into jail shortly after 4 p.m. facing 10 second-degree felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, according to charging documents filed in support of the arrest.

Utah’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, along with several local law enforcement agencies, executed Thursday a search warrant on the home in Washington County where Kane resides and seized his cell phone.

During the search, forensic examiners reportedly found the program used to transfer child pornography files installed on the suspect’s cell phone, as well as files containing child pornography depicting images of children, some as young as 6, being raped and sodomized.

According to the report, one of the videos found during the forensic search of Kane’s cell phone depicted a child who appeared to be 9 years old wearing dark sunglasses purportedly used to blindfold the youngster being raped by a man whose face was not visible in the video.

Agents provided a description of the video to serve “as a sample of the evidence of child pornography distributed from Kane’s home and found on his cell phone,” the report states.

During an interview with officers, Kane reportedly admitted to downloading and viewing child pornography, as well as using the peer-to-peer program captured on April 29. The suspect also said he used search terms that he knew would find child pornography downloads.

The suspect also told authorities he was “addicted to child pornography,” the report states, and that he masturbates while watching the videos. He also told agents he has been downloading and viewing these types of videos since the age of 11.

Kane allegedly admitted to seeing children as young as 6 or 7 years old being sexually abused in the files he would download – actions he said he knew were illegal.

The report also notes that Kane lives in the residence with his wife and two daughters that are within the same age range as the children raped in the pornographic videos he was downloading.

Kane denied that he ever sexually abused his own daughters, the report states.

Following the interview, Kane was booked into Purgatory Correctional Facility facing the charges listed above.

The case was handled by the Utah Attorney General’s Office’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) division – a multi-jurisdictional task force that investigates and prosecutes individuals who use the internet to exploit children.

Since the IP address in the case originated in the Washington County area, several agencies, all of which are ICAC affiliates, were involved in the investigation and subsequent arrest of Kane, including the St. George Police Department, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the Iron County Sheriff’s Office.

Ed. Note: A new Utah law generally prohibits the release of arrest booking photos until after a conviction is obtained. 

This report is based on statements from court records, police or other responders and may not contain the full scope of findings. Persons arrested or charged are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law or as otherwise decided by a trier-of-fact.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2021, all rights reserved.

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