Three charges dismissed against suspended firemanA suspended Powell fireman accused of using a Powell Fire Hall computer to access child pornography will face 19 felony counts in District Court, a Circuit Court judge decided Monday.At a preliminary hearing, Judge Bruce Waters found that there was enough evidence for prosecutors to try Doug Leichner, 43, for possession of child pornography for 19 different images. Waters dismissed three other counts over concern that those images were not child pornography as defined by state statute.

In District Court, Leichner will next be arraigned and formally enter a plea to the charges.

The investigating officer in the case, Lt. Dave Patterson of the Park County Sheriff's Department, was the only witness to testify at Monday's hearing.

Powell Volunteer Fire Department Chief Joey Darrah had contacted Patterson on Dec. 29 about suspicious sites being visited on the department's radio room computer. Patterson's subsequent scan of the computer discovered some 7,000 various pornographic images, with more than 100 appearing to be obvious child pornography, his affidavit says.

“This is a sample of the images there,” said Patterson on Monday of the 22 images in question.

Using Patterson's written descriptions of the pictures, Leichner's public defender, Travis Smith, said three of them — which reportedly depicted females appearing to be between 10 and 13 years old posing with their shirts off — did not appear to be child pornography as defined by state statute.

Judge Waters agreed with Smith and dismissed those counts while transferring the others to District Court.

Patterson said it was hard to describe the images without them present.

“I think they would need to be viewed in their entirety,” he testified.

He said the way the children were staged in the images reflected obscene content.

Deputy Park County Attorney Sam Krone, prosecuting the case, said he did not want to bring the images to the courtroom and bring them into the public domain.

Patterson said his scan of the computer showed that the files had been accessed on the night of Dec. 28, between 8:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., and apparently were transferred to a portable memory drive.

One non-pornographic image reportedly depicted Leichner a woman who was unidentified in court documents.

Leichner's former girlfriend, Dorri Reimer — who is also Chief Darrah's sister — reported seeing Leichner using the fire hall computer during that time frame, Patterson said.

Smith raised concerns about having only one witness.

“We really don't have anyone putting him (Leichner) at the fire hall (that night) except his estranged girlfriend,” said Smith, noting that a large number of individuals had access to the computer.

He also questioned if would be possible to access 7,000 images in an hour and a half.

“It's a lot,” said Patterson, but he added that in such investigations, “I don't think that's uncommon.”

When Patterson interviewed Leichner, he allegedly admitted to having previously accessed a variety of pornography on the fire hall's computer, but denied accessing any child pornography.

Leichner reportedly told Patterson that some pornographic sites have pop-up windows that automatically pull up many unwanted images. Leichner said it was possible that some illegal content had inadvertently been downloaded to the computer without him knowing or seeing it, the affidavit says.

Patterson had also seized a personal computer and a portable memory drive that Leichner had reportedly brought to and used at the fire hall to access the Internet, but no illegal content was found on those devices in Patterson's scans.

Those devices, along with the fire hall computer, are currently undergoing a more thorough analysis at state labs, Patterson said.

Smith asked Judge Waters to reduce Leichner's $100,000 cash bond to an assurity bond, noting that Leichner did not try to flee between his initial interview with Patterson on Jan. 15 and his arrest on Jan. 25.

Krone asked the court to leave Leichner's bond high given the amount of prison time that a conviction could bring. Waters agreed with Krone, leaving bond set at $100,000 cash.

If found guilty of all 19 counts, Leichner would face up to 190 years in prison and $190,000 in fines.

Leichner was suspended from the Powell Volunteer Fire Department when Patterson found illegal images on the fire hall's machine.

An earlier Tribune story misstated and oversimplified the sequence of events leading Fire Chief Darrah's report to the sheriff's office.

Leichner had been known to spend late hours at the hall, and the department was having problems with its computers crashing with viruses, Patterson's affidavit says.

“It was putting a whole bunch of things together,” said Darrah on Wednesday, adding that he doesn't remember the exact progression.

Darrah did say that in the roughly 24 to 48 hours prior to contacting the sheriff's office, he was told by another fireman's girlfriend that illegal content might have been accessed by Leichner. Then, on the night of Dec. 28,

Reimer told him that she had seen Leichner at the fire hall, Darrah said.