WARNING: Some of the details in this story are disturbing and graphic.
A 34-year-old Edmonton man who pleaded guilty to sexual offences against children was given a seven-year prison sentence on Thursday.
Justin George Coulombe was also placed on the national sex offender registry for life and banned for life from going to parks, playgrounds, schools, day cares or anywhere else where children congregate. He was also banned from using the internet to contact children.
On Nov. 2, Coulombe pleaded guilty to seven charges, including two counts of invitation to sexual touching involving a person under 16, two counts of sexual interference involving a person under 16, two counts of child pornography and one count of distribution of child pornography.
All of the incidents happened in Edmonton between July 2008 and July 2017 and involved underage boys.
Coulombe met his first victim, a 12-year-old boy, in the summer of 2008, according to an agreed statement of facts. The boy often attended a store in an Edmonton mall that catered to fans of role-playing board games.
Coulombe, a regular patron of the store, offered to give the boy advantages in the games if he showed him his penis.
“The accused took (the boy) to a vacant retail space in the mall where, at the direction of the accused, (the boy) touched his own penis in order to show it to the accused. The accused did not touch (the boy),” reads the agreed statement of facts.
Coulombe met his second victim, another 12-year-old boy, also through role-playing board games. On two occasions between 2012 and 2013, Coulombe offered advantages in the games in exchange for the boy showing him his penis. Coulombe did not touch the boy, according to the court document.
Sometime between 2012 and 2013, Coulombe met his third victim, also a 12-year-old boy. They knew each other through role-playing board games and sometimes the boy would go to Coulombe’s house to play games. On two separate occasions, Coulombe pulled down the boy’s pants and stroked his penis for several minutes.
“(The boy) wanted to leave, but being a young child he did not know what to do,” reads the agreed statement of facts.
Between the end of 2016 and middle of 2017, Coulombe met a 16-year-old boy who was a friend of one of the other victims. Coulombe invited the teen and another boy to his house to play video games on several occasions. The 16-year-old needed a new cellphone, which Coulombe bought for him. Coulombe then persuaded the teen to send him explicit pictures and video of himself.
Police later analyzed several of Coulombe’s digital devices, where they found pictures and video of the 16-year-old. The media qualified as child pornography.
The fifth victim was 12 when he met Coulombe in 2015 through some of the other boys and used Facebook to communicate with him.
“Many of the online conversations were dominated by discussions about masturbation,” reads the agreed statement of facts.
Several times over the next two years, Coulombe asked the boy to send him intimate pictures and police later found 11 pictures on Coulombe’s computer of the boy’s penis and bottom. The boy visited Coulombe’s house several times to play video games and on three occasions, Coulombe performed oral sex on him, the agreed statement of facts states.
Between 2011 and 2017, Coulombe accumulated and shared a large collection of child pornography, according to the agreed statement of facts.
The document states police found 25,677 child pornography images on six different devices. Accounting for duplication, there were 8,490 distinct images.
Police also found 4,219 videos of recorded child sexual exploitation. Again accounting for duplication, there were 2,948 distinct videos, according to the document.
Based on information from ALERT’s Internet Child Exploitation Unit, Global News previously reported that Coulombe sometimes posed as a Catholic priest, but that was not mentioned in court on Thursday.
With credit for time served, Coulombe has just over five years left on his sentence.
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