Newport Beach Sunday School Teacher Gets 60 Years for Molesting Boys

A former volunteer Sunday school teacher in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach was sentenced today to 60 years to life behind bars for sexually assaulting five boys and attempting to attack a sixth victim.

Christopher Bryan McKenzie had been charged with crimes involving seven victims, but one boy was unable to make it back from South Africa to testify against the defendant, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown.

McKenzie taught Sunday school at Christ Church by the Sea in Newport Beach from 2004 to 2006 and at Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa. He met three of his victims through Rock Harbor, one through Christ Church by the Sea, two through relatives and one at his apartment complex in Costa Mesa, according to Brown.

McKenzie also worked as a pool cleaner in Orange County, and he hired several of the victims as helpers, Brown said. In many of the cases, while on a job with one of the boys, he would show the youth a “note” he said was left on his car from an artist offering to pay the children to pose nude for a sculpture, Brown said.

When he got some of the boys alone, he rubbed them down with baby oil to get them aroused for the photos, the prosecutor said.

When one of the boys was working as an assistant on a pool-cleaning job and kicked a container full of chlorine, McKenzie “washed (the victim) down,” then told the youth he had received a letter from a sculptor who said the boy “had a really good body for sculpture,” Brown said.

“He convinced (the victim) this wasn’t weird, it was for art,” she told jurors.

The victims were all younger than 14, and the incidents happened between March 1995 and January 2012, Brown said.

The prosecutor said that when one boy refused the defendant’s advances, McKenzie said, “Are you ashamed of the body God gave you?”

The defendant paid the boys about $50 to pose in the nude for photos, according to Brown, who said investigators found about 350 images on McKenzie’s computer of children engaging in sex acts with adults and other children.

City News Service