LOS ANGELES: Impromptu detective work by a woman on an airline flight resulted in the arrest of another passenger whose text messages about sexually abusing children she photographed and gave to police, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Michael Kellar of Tacoma, Washington, will be charged on Tuesday with conspiring to make child pornography, prosecutors said, after he exchanged the explicit messages with a woman he met a year ago on a dating website.
He sent the messages to Gail Lynn Burnworth, also of Tacoma, while he was flying from Seattle to San Jose, California, on July 31, according to a criminal complaint.
The woman behind Kellar became alarmed as she could see the couple describe sexually abusing two children in Burnworth’s care. Burnworth promised to send Kellar pictures of her molesting the children while they slept.
“You can do this or are you just saying this???” Kellar replied in one message, apparently unaware the passenger behind him was taking photographs of his phone’s screen.
“No I think I can do it if I don’t have parents over my shoulder,” Burnworth responded. “And then on Sunday I will have the kids no parents just kids.”
The alarmed passenger, who has not been named, told flight attendants and later shared her photos with police who arrived to meet Kellar at the airport, the complaint said.
Kellar gave police his phone and told them he “likely” had a sexual interest in children, according to the complaint, but that the discussion of abusing the children in Burnworth’s care was fantasy. Kellar remained in custody on Tuesday and it was not clear whether he had a lawyer.
Later that day, police arrested Burnworth, who also acknowledged a sexual interest in prepubescent boys and girls, the complaint said.
Burnworth lives in Tacoma, Washington, with a man she referred to in messages as her former husband, along with his three children and the children’s mother.
She told authorities she had made up to 20 sexual images of the youngest two, a boy and a girl under 12 years old, to send to Kellar.
On her phone, police saw the full text message exchange in which the couple discussed drugging the children in order to rape them while the parents were away.
Both Kellar and Burnworth, who appeared in federal court in Tacoma on Monday, are charged with conspiring to produce child pornography, while Kellar, who is due to appear in federal court in San Jose, also faces a charge of attempted enticement of a minor.
Burnworth’s lawyer, a public defender, did not respond to a request for comment.
US plane passenger foils text message plot to molest children
US plane passenger foils text message plot to molest children
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
