Camilo Hurtado Campos (Franklin Police Dept.) and the home where he allegedly drugged and raped more than a dozen kids (WSMV screenshot)
New details have emerged in the case of Camilo Hurtado Campos, the 63-year-old youth soccer coach in Tennessee who was arrested last week after he left his unlocked cellphone at a restaurant where the staff found a trove of photos and videos in which he allegedly recorded himself drugging and raping at least 10 young boys.
The allegations being levied against Campos constitute “by far one of the most egregious and disturbing cases of child sex abuse” that his department and the community had ever encountered, Lt. Charles Warner of the Franklin Police Department said Tuesday in an interview with Knoxville ABC affiliate WATE-TV.
The investigation into Campos began when FPD officers were contacted by the staff of a local restaurant regarding a cellphone that a customer — later identified as Campos — had left behind. After finding the phone, several members of the staff looked through the device to try and find any information that would help them discover who owned the phone so they could return it.
“What they found, instead, were dozens of unconscionable videos and pictures of children, and so they called police,” authorities wrote in a news release.
FPD detectives initially found “hundreds of disturbing videos and pictures” on the phone and launched an “immediate and tireless investigation” into the provenance of the child sexual abuse material. Many of the videos depicted Campos himself “raping unconscious boys” between the approximate ages of 9 and 17 years old, police said.
In discussing the appalling sexual abuse allegations against Campos, Lt. Warner said he would use his position as a soccer coach to recruit and groom kids from local playgrounds — typically Hispanic children from poorer backgrounds. He would then invite them to his home where the alleged drugging and sexual assaults typically took place.
“It was a mixture — it was a variety of different drugs that he was using, but they were potent and powerful enough in the combinations that he was giving to them that it rendered them in a dangerously comatose state,” Warner told WATE. “What’s been described to me by the people that are reviewing these videos and these images is that these kids are like ragdolls; they’re comatose and just completely lethargic.”
In one case, Warner said that the victim “had no idea that they were a victim” because they were in such a drugged state when they were assaulted.
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Police said they were initially able to identify two of the 10 boys who appeared in the videos allegedly found on Campos’ phone. The department further said that following the announcement of Campos’ arrest, they were able to identify a third victim from his phone and an additional five victims they did not know about came forward.
“We are no where close to the end of our review of the evidence in this horrific case,” police tweeted on Monday evening.
Authorities also announced that Campos has admitted to being in the U.S. illegally.
“In response to the multiple inquiries we are receiving regarding his immigration status: In an interview with Homeland Security, Campos admitted that he is in the U.S. illegally,” police said
Campos, described by the police as a “popular soccer coach,” has lived in Franklin, Tennessee — which is about 20 miles south of Nashville — for the last 20 years, splitting his time between Hill Estates and, more recently, Glass Lane in downtown Franklin. Now, police say the investigation has already indicated that there more than “a decade” of kids fell prey to Campos’ alleged sexual abuse scheme.
“People who were victims in some of the recordings that have come forward are in their 20s now,” Lt. Warner told CNN. “If you do the math, there could be a decade of victims that we don’t know about. There are undoubtedly more (victims). We are in the infancy of this investigation, and this could be the tip of the iceberg.”
Any child or parent of a child who has been associated with Campos over the last two decades — particularly in a player-coach relationship — is being urged to contact FPD at (615) 794-2513 or via email at [email protected]
Campos is currently being held in the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility on $525,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on July 25. It was not immediately clear whether he had retained a defense attorney.
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