ABQ Journal: The head of the New Mexico Young America Football League said board members were “totally shocked” that an official with the organization had been arrested on child pornography charges.
“There was really nothing to indicate that something like this was going to happen; we were all totally shocked,” YAFL President Jim Summer said on Saturday, reacting to the Friday arrests of newly elected league president Frederick Gonzales, 42, and his wife, Carey Gonzales, 36, of Albuquerque.
The couple made their initial court appearance Saturday in Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court, as they were formally charged with manufacturing and distributing child pornography, according to a criminal complaint filed in Metro Court.
The arrests came after a four-month investigation by law enforcement, including the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office and New Mexico Attorney General’s Office.
On Saturday, Summer said the board met in the morning and removed Gonzales as president-elect and as a member of the organization, which oversees about 5,000 young players statewide, ranging in age from 7 to 14 years old.
“Obviously, it’s a bad time now for our organization, but we want to make clear that we don’t condone anything that Mr. Gonzales might have done, and that our next priority is to make sure that we protect the children that we have in our program,” he said.
Summer said Frederick Gonzales, as a YAFL volunteer, underwent criminal background checks in 2011 and 2012 and “passed.” He added that YAFL plans to hire an independent agency to review its procedures.
Summer said the board planned to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities.
Frederick Gonzales was incoming president of the New Mexico Young America Football League. Albuquerque Public Schools confirmed that his wife, Carey Gonzales, has been put on paid administrative leave from her job as an educational assistant at Montezuma Elementary, where she worked with kindergartners. The couple’s two school-age children were placed into state custody on Friday. Authorities have said there is no indication their children were depicted in any of the images.
According to the criminal complaint, in early September an agent with the state Attorney General’s Office was conducting investigations into child pornography on the ARES P2P file-sharing network.
On multiple occasions authorities downloaded files through the network from a computer with an IP, or Internet Protocol, address linked to the Gonzaleses’ home near Tramway and Copper NE, the complaint states.
The videos showed children, one identified as young as 3 to 5 years old, performing various sexual acts, according to the complaint. Authorities downloaded the files in September and November 2012, the report said.
Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office investigators executed a search warrant on the couple’s home Friday.
According to the complaint, Frederick Gonzales told officers he alone downloaded child porn, and that he later put the videos on DVDs, which he and his wife watched in their bedroom. He told officers that if he shared files, he wasn’t aware of it. He estimated that he had several hundred DVDs, but added that not all of them have child porn on them.
Both Frederick and Carey consented to take polygraphs to show that they never had any sexual contact with their two children, the complaint said.