A Castine man is facing charges of possessing child sexual abuse images after police received a tip that led to his house.
Jack R. Cukierski, 19, is accused of having multiple electronic devices on which police found roughly 200 images and a few dozen videos of girls between the ages of 4 and 16, according to an affidavit filed in Hancock County Unified Criminal Court. Police executed a search warrant at Cukierski’s house in April of this year.
During the search, police also found a locked container in his bedroom that contained “numerous pairs” of children and teenagers underwear in it, according to the court document. He said he stole them from other counselors at an unspecified Boy Scout camp where he worked, and denied he stole any from children, police wrote.
Cukierski’s defense attorney, Will Ashe of Ellsworth, did not respond to requests for comment.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children contacted Maine’s state computer crimes unit last December with information about someone uploading images of child sexual abuse to a Google account. The investigation later indicated that the images had been uploaded from a house where Cukierski lives, court documents indicate.
Police interviewed Cukierski when the search warrant was executed this past spring. Several months later, formal charges were filed and an arrest warrant was issued. Cukierski was arrested Sept. 2 on four charges — two dissemination charges for allegedly uploading some of the images to a Google account, and two possession charges. Some of the charges are more severe than the others because of the ages of the victims depicted in the images, court documents indicate.
Cukierski was bailed out of Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth on $10,000 bail on the same day of his arrest. He is due to make his initial appearance in court on the charges on Oct. 7.
As part of his bail conditions, he is not to be around children younger than 12 years old unless the parents of the children are there to supervise the contact. He also is prohibited from being around schools, parks or athletic facilities where children under the age of 12 gather, according to court documents. He also cannot use the internet and must submit to random searches and testing.
Cukierski sought permission from a judge to take adult education classes online, saying he otherwise would stay offline, but the court denied this request on Sept. 10, court documents indicate.