PYEONGTAEK, South Korea — A soldier whose buddies turned him in because he failed to delete child porn videos from his computer was sentenced at Camp Humphreys on Wednesday to prison and a discharge.
Spc. Christopher J. Friend, 25, of Company D, 1st Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography, going absent without leave, and having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2005.
Military judge Col. Donna M. Wright sentenced Friend to 15 months in prison, reduction to the military’s lowest pay grade and a bad-conduct discharge.
But Friend will serve only one year in prison under terms of a pretrial agreement.
When Friend arrived at Camp Stanley in South Korea last summer, he allowed several buddies to borrow his laptop computer, according to prosecutor Capt. Graham Smith.
Stored in his external hard drive they found a folder labeled “Bad videos,” with a subfolder labeled “Underage.”
It contained six videos depicting prepubescent children engaging in sex acts with mostly unidentified adult men.
The buddies urged Friend to delete the porn, but he didn’t.
About a month later they reported him to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Friend was slated for court-martial late last year, but he went AWOL, fleeing to his home state of Oklahoma.
He was absent from Nov. 16 to Dec. 17 before turning himself in to authorities at Fort Sill, Okla. During their investigation, CID agents learned of the consensual sex in 2005 with the 15-year-old.
Because he’d gone AWOL, the Army placed Friend in pretrial lockup for 142 days. He was to be returned Wednesday night to the Camp Humphreys jail to serve his sentence.
