To his family and friends, Fountain Valley-based wedding photographer David Brian White is generous, outgoing and loving–“the life of the party.”
But alert Huntington Beach Police Department detectives discovered a secret, criminal side of White.
For at least 15 years, he collected and distributed a large cache–1,300 videos–of child pornography, including sadistic images involving prepubescent girls.
After many of White's backers learned of his arrest, they still adamantly claim they trust him around their children.
That confidence did not extend inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
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Assistant United States Attorney Amanda N. Liskamm told a judge that White should be sent to prison for a whopping 97 months and undergo lifetime public registration as a sex offender.
According to law enforcement files, White's troubles began more than a decade ago. He was caught roaming an apartment complex to watch a female undress through a window in 1997 and later admitted he enthusiastically practiced voyeurism of couples having sex. Suspicious police once questioned him about taking photographs of girls near the Huntington Beach pier. The 1979 graduate of Fountain Valley High School and, later, Golden West College enjoyed collecting images of bestiality and scat. He'd also installed a hidden camera where women undressed for his professional photo sessions.
The party ended in late 2010 after undercover police found White's online, file-sharing, kiddie porn stash.
In 2011, a federal grand jury indicted him on two, child pornography counts and last June he signed a guilty plea.
To aid its arguments for leniency with a punishment of no more than supervised probation for five years, the defense hired a local clinical psychologist to claim White is no threat to children, an assertion Liskamm described as “astonishing.”
But this month, after considering 55-year-old White's apology, U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna determined the correct sentence is 70 months in prison and supervised probation for a decade once he re-emerges back into society.
According to court records, White isn't happy he must give federal agents full monitoring rights of his Internet activities during his post-prison, probation period.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.