Brooklyn federal jury convicts NYPD officer of child porn, sexual exploitation charges

A federal jury found an NYPD cop guilty Wednesday of four charges related to child pornography and sexual exploitation of children.

Timothy Martinez, 43, a 17-year NYPD veteran, was convicted of two counts of child sex exploitation, attempted receipt of child pornography, and possession of child pornography.

He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years at a sentencing hearing now scheduled for September. He remains under home confinement as a condition of his bail.

NYPD Officer Timothy Martinez is pictured in an undated photo. (US DOJ)

Martinez was arrested in 2020, after a search of his Staten Island home uncovered a laptop teeming with child porn images, and logs of video chats with two underage girls.

Prosecutors alleged that Martinez also reached out to a Twitter user he believed was an underage girl selling child pornography and bought explicit images.

They also said that Martinez chatted up the girls for years, convincing them to record themselves performing lewd acts. Both of them took the stand during the one-week trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.

One of the teens testified that she met Martinez using a Web site called Omegle, where people can find strangers to chat with, then started corresponding with him on Skype, both in text and on video.

She was on the verge of turning 13, looking for someone to talk about how she was abused and molested by her father, and she opened up to Martinez, she said.

“I didn’t have anyone to talk to, like I said, so I pretty much laid everything out on the line,” said the witness, who was identified in court as “Jane Doe Number 2.”

“I told him stuff that I actually didn’t tell my mother or any of my family or even my significant other till the other day,” she said.

FILE - Timothy Martinez, 43, a 17-year NYPD veteran, was convicted of two counts of child sex exploitation, attempted receipt of child pornography, and possession of child pornography. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News)

She testified that she recognized his voice during audio conversations, and the “cheesy” way he typed during text-only chats.

She also described a gross moment in their correspondence, which happened while he was deployed for the U.S. Army, and his fellow “Army buddies” were in the background were sleeping.

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“We were masturbating together and he shot himself in the eye when he ejaculated,” she said.

Martinez’s lawyer contended that the suspect wasn’t behind the keyboard for those chats, and didn’t download any of the child porn found on his laptop.

Views of the federal courthouse in Brooklyn on April 14, 2022. (Theodore Parisienne/for New York Daily News)

Martinez served in the Army Reserves and took the laptop with him to bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Romania, where he let his fellow service members use regularly. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people had access to what lawyer Peter Brill referred to as a “general use laptop.”

The teen victims could have been talking to any of those people, since they only saw his avatar photo during the Skype sessions, Brill argued.