15 Years For Man Who Sexually Assaulted Teen, Shared Child Porn

BURBANK, IL —A Burbank man was handed a 15-year sentence in a federal prison for sharing sexually explicit photos of children and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl he met online. Matthew Smith, 51, had pleaded guilty earlier this year to federal pornography charges. U.S. District Judge Charles R. Norgle sentenced Smith on Aug. 30. Smith's sentence is to be followed by ten years of supervised release.

Smith was a self-employed landscaper when he was accused of luring a 13-year-old Peoria girl to his Burbank apartment in June 2015. Cook County prosecutors said during Smith's bond hearing that Smith, using the screen name “darkangle25,” had befriended the girl on Lobby Chat, a chat room app which allows users to talk anonymously in different chat rooms. Smith and the girl eventually moved their online communications to Facebook and began calling and texting each other.

Burbank police said that Smith arranged to meet the girl through the popular teen social app Kik messenger. On June 8, 2015, the Peoria girl was spending the summer with relatives in Cicero. Burbank police said that Smith sent a cab to pick up the girl at her home to bring her to his Burbank apartment. According to the girl's mother, Burbank police found a text message on the girl's cell phone that read, "This is our time to shine. Your taxi is on the way."

For the next several days, Burbank police said that Smith and the girl engaged in sexual intercourse. Burbank police said that Smith admitted to knowing the girl was underage after he was arrested.

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The girl's mother told Patch in a 2015 interview that she first became aware of her daughter’s online relationship with Smith the year before when she discovered explicit text messages on her daughter's phone. The mother alleged that Smith was posing as a 16-year-old Illinois high school student.

"I knew this guy wasn't 16, but was older," the mom said. "I tried to do everything I could to scare [my daughter]. I told her, 'This guy is older than your father.'"

Sometime during Smith and her daughter's online relationship, the mother believes that her daughter learned Smith, who was listed in her daughter's contacts as "daddy," was older than a high school student. She doesn’t think that her daughter went to Smith's apartment on that June morning in 2015 to have sex.

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Federal authorities maintained that Smith also shared sexually explicit images of children engaged in sex acts on the Kik social app. Although many of the children in the images have not been identified, 17 victims submitted impact statements during Smith’s sentencing. U.S. Attorney Matthew Hernandez argued in the government's sentencing memorandum that the 17 victim statements "speak to the incalculable damage caused to those young victims of child pornography."

The girl's family members also submitted impact sentences, whose disappearance "caused her family immense suffering and prompted them to file a missing person report on her behalf," Hernandez said.