A Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce director and former city planning commissioner is accused of possessing and distributing child pornography using file-sharing networks on his personal computer.
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Lake Forest Scraps Pervs-in-Parks Ban
A statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not indicate how 61-year-old Jerry J. Zechmeister got on their radar, but investigators executed a search warrant at his Lake Forest residence in October 2013. Three computers and two external hard drives were seized, and a forensic review uncovered around 160 videos containing child pornography, according to ICE, whose investigators believe Zechmeister had been accessing and sharing the images for close to seven years.
Investigators from the Orange County Child Exploitation Task Force–including special agents with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations and detectives from the Newport Beach Police Department–took Zechmeister into custody Thursday. The case was turned over to the Orange County District Attorney's office, and Zechmeister is scheduled to be arraigned July 31 at Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach.
The Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce website indicates Zechmeister is the “director at large.” His photo is next to a link for Automated Power Technologies, which “sells, installs and services a wide range of power protection, power control, power conservation and precision air conditioning products for industrial, computer and telecommunication markets.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.