KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - A suburban Kansas City man who followed women around area retail stores so he could secretly record videos up their skirts was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in federal prison for attempting to produce child pornography.
Nicholas A. Braile, 26, of Independence, was arrested on May 15, 2014, after a security guard at an Independence Walmart saw him use his cellphone to take pictures up a woman's skirt. Investigators took his cellphone and asked if there were additional up-skirt photos, to which he acknowledged there were "three or four" more.
During interviews with detectives the next day, Braile admitted that he had used his phone to record a video up the woman's skirt at Walmart. According to plea agreement with prosecutors, he also said he obtained several other videos that day at Independence Center mall, where he said he frequently obtained videos of women and girls at various stores. He also admitted possessing child pornography.
He also told investigators he had taken several photos and videos of girls at his place of employment, including two teenagers who worked there.
Officers went to that Independence business and found in a woman's restroom a small section in the ceiling where the tile was missing and a paint roller was positioned over the gap. Detectives determined Braile had gone into an adjacent janitor's closet had used the paint roller to hold his cellphone over the hole so that he could film women in the restroom without their knowledge, court documents show.
A forensic examiner found 468 photos taken by Braile depicting prepubescent girls, both at his workplace and at Independence Center. None of the images depicted nudity, prosecutors said, but they focused on the rear ends and crotch areas of the children.
The examination of his computers also revealed hundreds of images of child pornography, most depicting girls ages 9 to 14, that he had downloaded from the Internet between November 2011 and late December 2012.
As part of Braile's sentence, he will be required to register as a sex offender and willl be ordered to pay restitution to the victims, should any of them make a claim seeking it.