When asked to describe the emotional impact of David Snow’s crimes, a 17-year-old girl wrote few words, but they were direct and powerful.
“No life, no friends, stay home in my room,” she wrote in her victim impact statement, presented at Snow’s sentencing hearing Tuesday.
She went on to describe crying in her sleep, feeling angry, afraid, sad, and having nightmares. She said she fears he will try to get into her house.
The girl was one of five children Snow secretly video recorded through peepholes in bathroom walls between 2011 and 2015, when he was arrested. The girls were roughly between ages nine and 15 at the time.
Snow also video recorded himself sexually assaulting two of the girls as they slept.
“I’m angry because my life has been turned inside out,” wrote one of girls he assaulted, describing suffering from depression and an eating disorder.
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She told the court she blames herself for some aspects of Snow’s crimes, and had decided to go through with the court process in order to protect her little daughter from similar predators.
Snow, 36, pleaded guilty to more than a dozen crimes, including sexual assault, exposing his genitals to children, and making and possessing child pornography.
Snow’s girlfriend had called police in February 2015 after she found a number of SD cards and a jump drive hidden behind an electrical panel in the couple’s laundry room. Opening the data on her computer, she found photos and videos of child pornography. The woman told police Snow had been known to barricade himself in a room with his computer, and had once barricaded himself in the laundry room for an entire night, using a drill to screw the door shut and saying he needed space.
Police searched the home and seized a laptop, a video recorder and a tablet in addition to the items the woman had turned over to them, all containing images and videos of child pornography.
Some of the videos had been filmed through what appeared to be peepholes in bathroom walls, and captured the children on the toilet, in the bath and in the shower.
In one video, two of the girls are seen standing on the toilet, attempting to investigate a red light one of them had seen in a ceiling fan while in the tub.
In a number of the videos, Snow’s face can be clearly seen as he sets up the camera, and in others, his voice is heard in conversations with others in the house. The videos were captured in three different residences.
Crown prosecutor Dana Sullivan and defence lawyer Shelley Senior submitted a joint sentencing suggestion for seven years in jail, with credit for the time Snow has already spent in custody. With credit given at the enhanced rate of 1 1/2 days for every one day spent behind bars, Snow has credit for 985 days in jail.
Sullivan noted Snow has a criminal record, though it doesn’t contain any child or sex-related crimes, and stressed the young age of the girls. He committed the crimes over a period of years and in a number of households, displaying deliberation and planning, she said. Not only did he sexually assault two of the girls, he filmed it, she said.
“If he hadn’t been caught by his partner at the time, who knows if he would have stopped?” Sullivan said, calling the crimes “planned, deliberate and repulsive.”
Sullivan did take Snow’s guilty pleas as a mitigating factor, noting he had spared the children and their parents from having to testify in a lengthy trial.
Senior noted Snow is remorseful for his crimes and has a history of being a productive member of society. He has overcome a drug addiction, she said, and had expressed a desire to rehabilitate.
“He, in fact, would like to stay in jail until he is certain that children are safe,” Senior said.
Senior acknowledged the harm Snow had caused the children and called his crimes “shameful and deplorable.” She explained Snow had been sexually abused by his father, Chris Snow, as a child and had likely grown up in a home where sexual abuse was normalized.
Chris Snow, 69, is known to many in St. John’s for driving a “Christmas truck” decorated with boughs and coloured lights and blaring music, and is serving a 10-year sentence for the repeated sexual assault of five children — boys and girls — as young as six years old, in the 1960s and 1970s. He was sentenced last December.
Justice David Hurley will render his sentencing decision Thursday.
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
