A young American man was arrested Monday afternoon at a Target mall in Greenville, North Carolina.
(Scene of arrest)
被捕男子名叫托马斯·瑞安·埃利奥特 (Thomas Ryan Elliott) ，今年21岁。
Reason for arrest - secretly photographing the woman's skirt with a mobile phone.
Arrest experience - when I was secretly filming, I was caught red-handed by a passing woman...
The female passerby did not know the victim girl who was secretly photographed, it was purely a righteous and courageous act, she happened to be shopping in the mall that day, and observed a man, that is, Elliott, behaving strangely, as if he was following a girl in a black dress, so she silently turned on the mobile phone camera on the side to record his behavior.
At the beginning of the video, Elliot has obviously locked on the woman in the black dress who is squatting in front of the shelf and concentrating on picking, staring at her brightly.
(Elliott, Victim)
Seeing that she was concentrating on selecting goods, he lightly turned to the opposite shelf, then squatted down, put the phone on the floor sideways, and slowly pushed it to the bottom of the woman's skirt...
But Elliott only paid attention to the passers-by on the nearby shelves, and didn't notice that the female passer-by in the distance had recorded everything...
(Elliott, Victim)
At the moment when he just pushed his mobile phone under his skirt, the female passerby recorded the key evidence and immediately shouted to stop... The woman in the black dress and Elliott were both startled when they heard this, and looked up at the same time...
(Elliott, Victim)
After that, the female passerby turned the camera to the side and questioned Elliott while pushing the shopping cart over, and Elliott denied it from beginning to end, in a very calm and innocent tone.
Then the female passerby called the mall security and the police, Elliott was arrested, and when the police detained Elliott, he still calmly denied it, saying that he had not done any wrongdoing, and also showed the police a recent photo on his phone to prove his "innocence"...
Until the female passerby showed this ultra-clear video and confronted Elliott on the spot, he was speechless and couldn't deny it anymore...
(Elliott, Victim)
Because according to the video taken by the female passerby, Elliott can be clearly seen squatting on the edge of the woman's skirt, placing her phone on the floor, and trying to take pictures of the inside of the clothes.
(Elliott, Victim)
Afterwards, the victim girl agreed to be anonymous and appeared on the back to be interviewed by the TV station...
According to her recollection, when she was picking up merchandise in front of the Target shelf that day, she realized that someone seemed to be hovering suspiciously around her, and that person was Elliott who was trying to take a sneak peek.
She felt very unwell, so she decided to stand up and walk away from him and walk briskly... But Elliot still lingered around her, waiting for an opportunity to make her upset.
The victim said that when she moved, Elliot crouched behind her and placed her phone under her skirt. Although he was arrested, she didn't dare to come to Target alone to buy things now...
The reason why she came forward was that she hoped that her experience would help other girls avoid harm, and this kind of bad candid photography will not only happen in the chaotic big cities, but also in the small towns.
(Victim, moderator)
As the candid video went online, Elliott's personal information was quickly doxed, including his social media...
Maybe not so shocking – his Facebook profile picture is a couple avatar...
It turned out that Elliott had a stable girlfriend, and the two officially announced their relationship on the Internet at the beginning of last year, and there were also many photos of his loving couple posted on the page.
Now that Elliott has been arrested, the photos of his girlfriend have been circulated throughout the Internet along with his scandal, and he is really innocent after experiencing social death...
(Elliott, girlfriend)
At the same time, it was also discovered that Elliot was a parishioner of the Opendoor church and seemed to have been baptized only recently...
(Screenshot of Elliott's Facebook account)
If the above is not strange, then what is even more unacceptable is:
Elliott actually volunteered at Greenville East Elementary School, and God knows if he had ever done anything else at school.....
After the police learned that Elliott worked at the school, they applied for a cell phone search warrant to check his phone for content related to child sexual assault and find a way to recover the deleted data...
If he did do anything out of the ordinary at school, the punishment would have been harsher in the future, but I hope he didn't do it - not for him, for the sake of the child.
But even if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to keep his job.
A spokesperson for the school has said they will never let him come back to work at the school and will not hire him in the future, stressing that both volunteers and visitors to the school will undergo a screening program to ensure they have no sexual criminal record before entering the school.
(Photo of Elliott's arrest)
Elliott is currently on $5,000 bail and has been released, with police charging him with a felony charge of "voyeurism," and he will appear in court next Tuesday...
Hopefully, there will be no more victims, and that Elliott will get the punishment he deserves in court...