Police & prosecutors concerned by growing cases of voyeurism
Oct 31, 2016, 5:27 PM | Updated: 5:31 pm
From lifeguards to TSA agents, prosecutors are concerned about the growing number of local voyeurism cases. (KIRO 7)
(KIRO 7)
Allen Han-Kit Zse showed little emotion as the felony charges against him were read aloud in King County Superior Court on a late October morning.
The 25-year old is charged with recording eight videos of undressed women and girls at Hartman Pool on Northeast 104th Street in Redmond, where Zse worked as head lifeguard until his arrest in early September.
Zse is just one of many local men in the Pacific Northwest recently arrested and charged with felony voyeurism.
Former TSA agent Nicholas James Fernandez is charged with shooting up-skirt video of a woman at Sea-Tac airport. The 29-year old Tukwila man was fired from his job at the airport after the allegations came to light in July.
Wei-Chen Lin of Seattle was sentenced on October 26th to just nine months of work release and twelve months of community supervision for recording video of men using the restroom at Cascadia College in Bothell in May. Even though it was Lin’s third conviction for voyeurism, the registered sex offender received no jail time.In all of those cases, according to investigators, the suspects used cellphones to record the illegal images.
Another defendant even built a wooden stand to steady his smartphone.
Mario Morales-Herrera was charged with shooting video of a 10-year old girl and a 40-year old woman inside the women’s restroom of the Des Moines Public Library in 2014. Traci Pigg was the first to notice the home-made device Morales-Herrera installed between the bathroom stalls. “There were actually kids I knew in there that did not have parents,” Pigg told KIRO 7 shortly after Morales-Herrera’s arrest. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think they might have used that bathroom when he was sitting in the next stall over.”
On the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Leonard Raymundo was charged with shooting “86 video images of 93 different unidentified females.” Investigators told KIRO 7, Raymundo used a camera smaller than a thumb drive.
According to those who arrest and prosecute these crimes, voyeurism is on the rise because nearly everyone carries a recording device everywhere they go.
