Join me to hear the story of Officer Timothy Horwath of California Highway Patrol who also happens to be a pedophile living on Data Drive. While I discuss that Officer Horwath was caught with child pornography, I try not to get into the subject material itself for those that may be sensitive to this subject. If you thought being caught with child pornography would be bad enough for Officer Horwath, you won’t believe what he does while he is out on bond before trial! This is eCrimeBytes Season 2 Episode 14 Act 3 – Officer Timothy Horwath Sentenced For Child Pornography – Act 3: Punishment.
For the background, please check out our prior acts:
- https://drkeithjones.com/index.php/2023/10/30/officer-timothy-horwath-sentenced-for-child-pornography-act-1-the-investigation/
- https://drkeithjones.com/index.php/2023/10/31/officer-timothy-horwath-sentenced-for-child-pornography-act-2-the-balls/
Sources:
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/former-chp-officer-sentenced-10-years-prison-receipt-child-pornography
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16565821/united-states-v-horwath/
Transcript:
00:00:10:01 – 00:00:32:05
Keith
Hey, welcome back to eCrimeByte Season two Episode 14. Officer Timothy Horwath is sentenced for child pornography. This is Act three, which is punishment. And you really need to see Acts one and two, because if I can give you a real quick tour, Officer Timothy Horwath had a laptop in his police bag in his garage that had child porn on it.
00:00:32:12 – 00:00:56:57
Keith
He had child porn on phones that were on him. And when he was arrested and charged, he was allowed to be free on bond with some conditions that he not be in contact with young people and that he not be around computers and he violated all that. He had iPads, phones. He had Comcast routers that he shouldn’t have had.
00:00:56:57 – 00:01:04:40
Keith
He had t mobile hotspots, all stuff he wasn’t supposed to be doing while he was on release, but he was doing them.
00:01:04:40 – 00:01:08:54
Keith
So the government has caught up with him at this point, and I’m going to bring that to you here
00:01:08:54 – 00:01:34:37
Keith
in Act three, which is punishment. So now we’re in February 22nd of 2023, and they were doing a triage analysis of Horwath’s phones and they found a bunch of communications with presumably young people, again, because he’s asking questions like, are you 18 years old? And then after they answer, they would get into sexual conversations and then there were exchanges of nude photos.
00:01:34:42 – 00:01:39:33
Keith
So this also violates his pretrial release agreements, right.
00:01:39:33 – 00:01:52:19
Keith
His communications, a lot of times with young females in the Philippines. And a lot of times he would offer them money. And one of the times he was quoted as saying, I am your boyfriend now and I should take care of you.
00:01:52:19 – 00:01:53:00
Keith
Creepy, right?
00:01:53:00 – 00:01:57:34
Keith
So in February 2023, the government says, hey, listen, we’ve done surveillance.
00:01:57:48 – 00:02:24:11
Keith
I brought you that in Act two previously. We’ve done our searches, which was Act one, where they found all that shit in his garage and they said, Hey, he’s come back and he’s still breaking all these agreements he agreed to to be out of jail before trial. We don’t think there is any set of circumstances that we could put together that would keep him safe from society.
00:02:24:16 – 00:02:59:42
Keith
And what do you know? The court agreed and they said, yep, he’s going to be detained. He’s going be detained until trial. And I think this helped facilitate his plea agreement because a couple of months later, in April, he plead guilty. So not much happened between April and September of this year, which is still all 2023. There was a forfeiture order that came through in September 23 that said that the government could seize those three things that they asked for earlier, which was his Toshiba satellite computer, which was in that police officer bag and two of the phones.
00:02:59:42 – 00:03:02:21
Keith
One of them was LG Phone and one was Alcatel phone.
00:03:02:21 – 00:03:24:35
Keith
So a month later, we’re now talking October second of 2023. So this is just a couple of weeks ago from this recording and at sentencing, the government wants a sentence of 121 months in prison, followed by ten years supervised release, $53,000 in restitution. And a special assessment of 50 $100.
00:03:24:40 – 00:03:58:11
Keith
The defense comes back and probably doesn’t have a whole lot to stand on, but they’re like, we would like six tymonths, please. Which is five years, which is the minimum. I can’t imagine they would give him the minimum. And that’s assuming, you know, just the fact he’s a police officer. I mean, he knew better. So the one thing that I’m going to note here is the defense said we want sixty months because because Horwath was abused by an elderly neighbor when he was 8 to 10 years old.
00:03:58:16 – 00:04:26:23
Keith
Whether or not that is true, I don’t know. I mean, we could go down the whole tangent of a lot of times abusers are abused themselves and a lot of times they abuse children at age ranges that they were abused themselves. And if this was true, if you put all that together and you assume all that was true, 8 to 10 years old kind of fits in the range of the child pornography that I talked about in Act One.
00:04:26:28 – 00:04:26:53
Keith
So
00:04:26:53 – 00:04:30:49
Keith
that was the defense’s argument for less time.
00:04:30:49 – 00:04:51:03
Keith
So sentencing rolls around that day and they said pleading guilty to one count of child pornography or receipt of child pornography, and he’s going to be in prison for a term of 121 months. And I want only shit. They actually gave him the whole thing. So that’s just over ten years.
00:04:51:08 – 00:05:14:27
Keith
So the government asked for just over ten years. They got just over ten years. When he’s released. He will also be supervised for an additional 120 months. So he’s going to be in prison for ten years and then he’s going to be supervised for an additional ten years. Hopefully, that will keep children safe from former officer Timothy Horwath.
00:05:14:32 – 00:05:15:58
Keith
They also had a bunch of
00:05:15:58 – 00:05:35:06
Keith
mandatory mandatory conditions of his supervised release, things like, you know, you can’t come into contact with kids, You can’t loiter within a hundred feet of schools, parks, all this stuff that they said he couldn’t do under his pretrial services agreement, but he still did. So I don’t know if
00:05:35:06 – 00:05:36:30
Keith
he will abide by this or not.
00:05:36:33 – 00:05:57:51
Keith
Maybe after ten years in the prison he will. Who knows? Another one of the things that they said is he must not communicate or otherwise interact with a victim. And they gave the victim name. And I’m not even going to give that. It’s that’s even obfuscated and I’m not naming it that it’s from this child porn series that officer Horwath had on his computer.
00:05:57:51 – 00:06:21:36
Keith
So it sounds like law enforcement was able to track down some victims in this case and actually put it to a person. And I don’t know if Officer Horwath had contact with that person or not or if this is just a standard thing that the government says you can’t contact this person no matter what. But it seemed weird to me, so I thought I would bring it up to you here that they actually named a victim here and he couldn’t contact them.
00:06:21:36 – 00:06:53:42
Keith
They also said he can’t read, view, possess any material depicting sexual content involving adults or children. So basically, it’s a blanket statement of you cannot view pornography any more on computers or anywhere else photographs, books, writings, drawings, video games, basically any type of pornography, you cannot have access to it. He they also say he has to attend sex offender treatment.
00:06:53:42 – 00:07:08:00
Keith
He has to go through periodic polygraph testing at the discretion of his probation officer. He can’t access computers or any online computer service unless it’s approved by his probation officer.
00:07:08:00 – 00:07:11:55
Keith
Also, he can’t access cell phones and cell phones that can access the Internet.
00:07:11:55 – 00:07:28:44
Keith
Okay. So we get to his penalties and there’s the $5100 assessment upfront. There is this other restitution, this $53,000 restitution that actually goes to the victims.
00:07:28:44 – 00:07:44:09
Keith
And I’m not going to talk about who the victims are, but they divided them up in the court documents. I think it was four or five different groups of victims. And they divide that money between them. And they say when he pays it all go in this proportion to all these different victims.
00:07:44:09 – 00:07:47:13
Keith
So that is it. Okay. So some of my final thoughts.
00:07:47:13 – 00:08:10:32
Keith
First of all, I fucking hate the subject material, like I said, but it’s like a lion’s share of these cases are child pornography. And this one being an officer was especially, I think, important to talk about. I found it very shocking that given he’s an officer, he was caught and then he was giving very clear instructions when he was let out of jail.
00:08:10:37 – 00:08:19:02
Keith
Don’t access computer and don’t talk to young kids. But he still did it. He still went back and he did it.
00:08:19:02 – 00:08:21:12
Keith
You know, if you measure
00:08:21:12 – 00:08:26:26
Keith
the sentences, we saw some sentences where there were tax evasion or tax fraud
00:08:26:26 – 00:08:33:47
Keith
and it was ten years for millions of dollars. Here it was ten years, but it was a sexual related offense.
00:08:33:52 – 00:08:55:57
Keith
So if you were going to measure non-sexual related offenses versus sexual related offenses and you give more weight to the sexual related offenses and you say this should be punished more in that scenario, this ten years kind of feels like if you compare it to the ten years for the people that used the IRS to,
00:08:55:57 – 00:08:58:19
Keith
file false tax returns,
00:08:58:19 – 00:09:03:02
Keith
it feels like an apples and oranges comparison where they’re getting the same sentence.
00:09:03:07 – 00:09:07:43
Keith
But here there was sexual criminality to it.
00:09:07:43 – 00:09:25:07
Keith
To me, that just felt weird. So I thought I’d bring it up and talk about it. So the last thing is, I can imagine this dude, when he gets into prison is going to be the biggest target out there because he’s former law enforcement. So I imagine the prison population finds out about that,
00:09:25:07 – 00:09:45:14
Keith
that’s going to be a strike against him. He’s also a kid known as a kid diddler because he’s into child pornography, which is also another low ladder rung in prison. So you combine those two facts, I imagine he’s going to I don’t I couldn’t imagine being in general population if he is is
00:09:45:14 – 00:09:52:55
Keith
it could be tough for him if if this information ends up becoming public, I imagine it’ll be tough for him.
00:09:53:00 – 00:10:07:57
Keith
So with that, thank goodness this case is over. But the overlying arching concept of electronic crime and an officer who should be trusted doing all these egregious things that he should not be doing. So
00:10:07:57 – 00:10:21:17
Keith
if there was anything in this episode that you liked, you know, the amount of research that I did or the level of detail that I brought to you in this case, please like, subscribe, follow.
00:10:21:22 – 00:10:42:45
Keith
Thumbs up, whatever it is on the application that you’re watching this on. Now, you haven’t visited our website, please do. It’s eCrimeBytes.com, bytes spelled the computer way b y y as in yellow milk.,t e s dot com. And with that, I want to give you a real quick preview of next week because this case blew my mind.
00:10:42:45 – 00:11:09:04
Keith
I went across my radar and I was like, this definitely has to become an episode soon because it was so unique. It is burning Teslas with Michael A. Gonzalez and I’m not going to give too much of it away of why he burnt the Tesla. But it’s a really interesting story that involves electronic crime and involves physical destruction of the Tesla. And this picture I’m showing you on your screen right now, that’s evidence.
00:11:09:04 – 00:11:25:56
Keith
That’s one of the Teslas that was burned out in the middle of a lake. And you’re like, why is it out in the middle of a lake and burned? You’re going to have to come back to eCrimeBytes Season two Episode 15 Burning Teslas with Michael A. Gonzales to find out. And I look forward to seeing you then. Thanks.
00:11:26:01 – 00:11:26:49
Keith
Bye.
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