Broward child porn suspect did searches on Parkland shooting, eyed other school as target
In September, a 21-year-old man was arrested after using his cellular phone to take videos of an unclothed woman in a dressing room at a mall in Broward County.
Vinh S. Nguyen was charged with “video voyeurism,” a third-degree felony, and pleaded not guilty. But then the Plantation Police Department obtained a search warrant to take a look at the downloads on his Samsung Galaxy phone.
Investigators found 16 videos of child pornography involving infants and female children ages 5 to 15. Also on the phone were instructions on how to frighten young female victims online, court records show.
If those images weren’t disturbing enough, a Plantation detective and the FBI would make another troubling discovery after obtaining a warrant in mid-February to examine Nguyen’s searches on his Google accounts. And it wasn’t just files of 13 more child-porn videos.
According to federal court records, Nguyen was using Google to search for crime scene photos of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, which took the lives of 17 students and staff on Feb. 14, 2018. Nguyen also did online searches for Nikolas Cruz, a former student at the Parkland high school who attacked the school with an assault rifle. Nguyen also searched for local gun ranges and directions from his family’s home in Margate to Harbordale Elementary School — a Fort Lauderdale school to which he had no connection, according to court records and testimony.
“Accordingly, the defendant constitutes a danger to the community,” Magistrate Judge Lurana Snow found in a detention order filed Friday. The judge did not find Nguyen was a risk of flight, despite trips to Vietnam to visit a grandparent, because he’s a native of South Florida and has close ties here.
Nguyen, who was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 25 and charged with possessing child porn with intent to view it, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment last week. He faces up to 20 years in prison. His lawyer, Robert Berube with the Federal Public Defender’s Office, declined to comment.
Nguyen was not charged in connection with his Google searches related to the mass shooting in Parkland.
Court records show that Nguyen had been free on a $7,500 bond in the state voyeurism case for about five months before the FBI brought him into custody in the federal child-porn case.
At least one parent of a Parkland high school student killed in the shooting on Valentine’s Day two years ago said Nguyen belonged behind bars for the safety of students and the broader public.
“Based on what you’re telling me, locked up is where he ought to be,” said Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg, who was a 14-year-old freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. “We can’t take chances with those we predict can inflict harm.”
It was not clear from the court records whether the FBI or Plantation police detective Lee Bieber, who works on the bureau’s Child Exploitation Task Force, notified the Broward County Public Schools about Nguyen or the possible threat to Harbordale Elementary School.
The FBI declined to comment on the Nguyen case and whether agents alerted officials with the Broward schools. But the bureau’s Miami spokesman, special agent Mike Leverock, said that “as a matter of policy, when the FBI encounters a situation wherein an alleged threat is made or insinuated, we do not hesitate to take appropriate measures.”
The school district declined to comment, referring Herald questions about the Nguyen case to the FBI.
The issue of exchanging information has been a sensitive subject in the past.
In November 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that two FBI employees were disciplined for failing to pass along a tip that the alleged Parkland shooter, Cruz, “was going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up” 40 days before the country’s deadliest high school shooting.
Wray’s answer at a Senate hearing was the first public acknowledgment that the FBI meted out discipline to employees that mishandled the tip.
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 7:00 AM.