MONTICELLO, Minn. — A Wright Country man is facing 17 felony charges for allegedly being in possession of and taking more than 1 million images and videos of a young girl.
According to a criminal complaint filed in Wright County District Court, 27-year-old Matthew Winter of Monticello is charged with multiple counts of interfering with the privacy of a minor and possession of pornographic images.
The complaint said the child spoke with a sheriff’s deputy at her school about the situation in April 2022 and told law enforcement she had seen a camera in the floor vent of her bedroom two months earlier, which was next to her mother and her mother’s boyfriend’s room, who was identified as Winter.
The documents said a short time later, the now 14-year-old girl noticed a charging block plugged into one of her bedroom outlets and found another camera, which she later handed over to her mother.
The minor found cameras in a bathroom inside the house when she was showering, including her old iPhone in the ceiling vent, according to the complaint.
Investigators from the Wright County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant at the family’s house and obtained Winter’s phone. When asked about the ceiling vent camera, Winter said he put the old phone there “to keep it away from his 3-year-old son, who lost privileges to play with the phone,” court documents said.
Winter admitted to a detective conducting the search that there were things on the phone “that shouldn’t be there,” including pornographic images, the complaint said. According to the court documents, Winter admitted he viewed them “more than a few times."
Through their search, investigators located more than 1 million images of the child in her bedroom and more than 10 gigabytes of footage of the child "in various stages of undress," the complaint said.
Winter has a pre-trial scheduled for July 21. If convicted, each felony offense is punishable up to the maximum sentence of 4-5 years in prison.
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