An NYPD cop filled his laptop with child porn and had graphic video chats with two underage girls, prosecutors alleged on the first day of the cop’s Brooklyn federal trial Tuesday.
Officer Timothy Martinez, 43, was busted in February 2020 after a search of his Staten Island apartment five months earlier turned up child pornography and evidence he’d been chatting on Skype with two teenage girls for several years, according to prosecutors.
“The defendant sought out underage girls on the internet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Campos told jurors in his opening argument in Brooklyn Federal Court Tuesday.
One of the girls “met the defendant online when she was 13 years old. He listened to her troubles and seemed sympathetic to her trauma,” Campos said.
Martinez also reached out to a Twitter user he believed was an underage girl selling child pornography and bought explicit images with Cash App payments, according to prosecutors.
Federal authorities caught wind of Martinez after a police department in Texas learned of the Twitter user and made a referral to the Department of Homeland Security.
“He admitted that he messaged (the user) on Twitter and that he received at least one sexual image,” Campos said.
When federal agents searched his apartment they say they found 400 child porn files on a laptop along with the Skype chat logs. They identified the two girls, who are expected to testify at Martinez’s trial.
Martinez’s lawyer, Peter Brill, argued that prosecutors can’t link the child porn or the Skype chats to his client. Martinez served in the U.S. Army Reserves and Brill said he took the laptop with him to bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Romania.
“That laptop became a general use laptop,” Brill said. “Tim shared that laptop with dozens, if not hundreds, of people over the course of his military tour.”
The Skype call victims saw a still photo of his face as a user avatar during their conversations but didn’t see live video and “don’t know who they’re talking to,” Brill argued in court. “He’s not the guilty party here.”
Federal agents found the laptop with a cracked screen on a bookshelf under clothes in Martinez’s home.
“It was as big as big a shock to Tim as it was to anyone else,” Brill said of the charges.
Brill argued there’s no proof the person in the explicit photo Martinez purchases over Twitter was underage since the government never identified that person.
Martinez, who joined the NYPD in July 2006, is charged with possessing child pornography, receiving and attempting to receive child pornography and sexual exploitation of a child. He is suspended with pay by the NYPD.