An Ecorse man who sexually exploited children online was given a 10-year prison sentence on Monday.
On June 5, Mark-Anthony Markiewicz, 29, entered a guilty plea to three charges of compulsion and enticing of a juvenile, according to a news statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan.
According to a sentencing letter filed on September 11, Markiewicz posed as 16 and had sexually explicit chats with two 15-year-olds and one 16-year-old on Snapchat between June 2022 and October 2023.
According to the document, he also used two usernames on the app, “gothamsbatman95” and “anthonyo.owoot,” to interact with at least 20 to 25 people who were between the ages of 13 and 16.
On Tuesday, it was not immediately possible to get in touch with Markiewicz’s lawyer, a federal community defender who is not listed in online court records.
In exchange for money, Markiewicz demanded recordings and pictures of the children in their undies. She even threatened to send one victim’s naked pictures to her family and job.
According to the document, on or around June 17, 2023, the father of one juvenile victim called the FBI to report that his 15-year-old daughter had sent pictures of herself to an adult guy on Snapchat.
According to investigators, Markiewicz had been contacting the girl, claiming to be sixteen, and paying her about $378 in total for pictures of herself in the nude.
Following her breakup with Markiewicz in May 2023, the girl made a public Snapchat post with a photo of her current partner. Soon after, Markiewicz got in touch with her and threatened to send pictures of the teenager to her parents, boss, and boyfriend.
In a victim impact statement cited in the sentencing memo, the girl’s mother wrote, “[t]he fact that Mark A[n]thony built [her daughter’s] trust, befriended her, and lied about his age, all to perpetuate her trusting him and thinking he was a peer so he could ask for[…] pictures is devastating to me.”
According to the document, he also used the program to emotionally manipulate other young girls by sending them sexual texts along with ones expressing how serious he was about their relationships.
When he was caught at work, Markiewicz informed FBI investigators he had a girlfriend who was 19 years old, and he acknowledged engaging in similar behavior with up to 25 kids.
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The girlfriend told detectives that she didn’t know Markiewicz’s true age until she learned he had been detained and that he had sought nude photos of her when she was a child.
“Our office will continue to aggressively prosecute child exploitation offenses to protect the children in our community and stop individuals like Markiewicz from victimizing children online,” U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison stated.
The case came to a conclusion weeks ago when two Nigerian brothers were found guilty on Thursday of sexually abusing a homecoming king from the Upper Peninsula, who later killed himself the previous year.
