FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A former assistant Boy Scouts master was sentenced to a year of probation on Thursday for showing a group of boys pornography.
Mark Kern pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of displaying harmful materials to children. He initially faced two felony counts of distributing obscene material to minors.
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A boy testified that Kern noticed that the boys were looking at girls and "started pulling pictures of even better looking girls on his phone, then it progressed to pictures of girls in bikinis and soon after, pornography."
One of the boys' fathers filed a police report with the Sunrise Police Department in 2015 after his 12-year-old son told him that Kern showed the troop pornography.
Joe Gonzalez said Kern showed the boys, ages 10 to 16, the pornography in the parking lot of a church in Sunrise.Gonzalez said he told the troop leader, Steve Zanetti, who said they would handle the situation internally.
Boy Scout policy demands that any "showing of obscene material" be reported to local authorities immediately.
Gonzalez said Kern was removed from Troop 309 about a month later by the South Florida Council, located in Miami Lakes, but Boy Scout leaders failed to report the incident to authorities.
Gonzalez filed the police report himself.
Sunrise police Detective David Lowenstein wrote in his report that five scouts gave similarly graphic descriptions of the hard-core porn they were shown by Kern.
Lowenstein wrote that Kern then made a voluntary statement in the case and admitted to showing the boys pornographic video clips on his phone.