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HomeNewsWrens Cop Arrested After 12-Month Child Sex Sting

Wrens Cop Arrested After 12-Month Child Sex Sting

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A Wrens police officer was arrested Thursday on accusations that he had obscene contact on the Internet with someone he believed to be a juvenile.

Wrens Officer Brett Smith mugOfficer Brett Smith, 31, was arrested Thursday morning by the GBI on a Grand Jury Arrest Warrant that includes five counts against him:

  • 3 counts: Obscene Contact with a Child
  • 2 counts: Obscene Internet Contact with a Child

GBI Agent Leigh Brooks said Smith began communicating with someone online a year ago that he believed to be an underage girl. But he was actually communicating with an undercover GBI agent. Smith is accused of having obscene contact with the “underage girl” over the last year, according to Brooks, who works with the GBI’s Child Exploitation And Computer Crimes Unit.

Smith was employed at Wrens Police Department in Jefferson County, but he was immediately suspended after his arrest. He resides in Thomson. He was jailed without bond in Columbia County, suggesting the crimes may have occurred there.

Wrens Police officials released this statement after the arrest:

“The City of Wrens has suspended Brett Chapman Smith from employment while the City conducts an internal investigation into the allegations.”

The charge of “Obscene Internet Contact with a Child” is described this way in the Georgia law:

A person commits the offense of obscene Internet contact with a child if he or she has contact with someone he or she knows to be a child or with someone he or she believes to be a child via a computer on-line service or Internet service, including but not limited to a local bulletin board service, Internet chat room, e-mail, or on-line messaging service, and the contact involves any matter containing explicit verbal descriptions or narrative accounts of sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse that is intended to arouse or satisfy the sexual desire of either the child or the person, provided that no conviction shall be had for a violation of this subsection on the unsupported testimony of a child.
(2) Any person who violates paragraph (1) of this subsection shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than ten years or by a fine of not more than $10,000.00; provided, however, that, if at the time of the offense the victim was 14 or 15 years of age and the defendant was no more than three years older than the victim, then the defendant shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature.

 

 

Greg Rickabaugh
Greg Rickabaugh
Greg Rickabaugh is an award-winning crime reporter in the Augusta-Aiken area with experience writing for The Augusta Chronicle, The Augusta Press and serving as publisher of The Jail Report. Rickabaugh is a 1994 graduate of the University of South Carolina and has appeared on several crime documentaries on the Investigation Discovery channel.
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