MARQUETTE, MI— A Mackinac County man has been sentenced in federal court for exploiting a 12-year-old girl.
Kelton Salowitz, 19, of Curtis was given 15 years in prison and 10 years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty to repeatedly asking the girl, who lived in another state, to send him sexually explicit photos and videos. He communicated with her on his phone through the Discord app. One of the videos recovered from defendant’s phone was a recorded livestream in which the child performed sexual acts at the instruction of Salowitz.
In addition, Salowitz requested, but did not receive, similar content from another 12-year-old, and investigators recovered a collection of child pornography on his phone which included videos of men sexually assaulting children.
The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, investigated this matter.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) provides the following Top 10 Tips2Protect for parents to protect their children from online predators:
- Start an open, two-way conversation with your child.
- Password-protect or control access to your child’s app store and gaming downloads.
- Set time and area limits for use of devices and set device check-in times.
- Set all apps, games and devices to private.
- Turn off location data services on social media and nonessential apps.
- Talk about data permanency. Online data can last a lifetime.
- Create a contract with your child regarding online behavior.
- Know your child’s friend lists. Remove strangers.
- Warn your child that they should never leave a game to chat with someone they don’t know on a different platform.
- Do not delete messages, images or videos from predators and do not forward any sexually explicit images or videos. Save usernames, screenshots and images or videos as evidence for law enforcement to collect directly from the device.
Further information for parents about how to protect their children, what to share with them, and the signs of online sexual exploitation are available on the agency’s Know2Protect (K2P) website.
