OH10: Police responded immediately to house of video voyeur of children to protect the evidence, and it was reasonably done because defendant had to be aware he was discovered

Officers had exigent circumstances to remove defendant from his home pending obtaining a search warrant. Officers received a call from the mother of two underage girls who were at defendant’s house with others in the swimming pool, when they discovered a video camera hidden in the bathroom with them visible on the LCD screen. They went right to his house to preserve the crime scene. After he was removed, a search warrant was obtained and the camera and other child pornography was found. The police did not create the exigency; the defendant’s knowledge that the girls discovered the camera was the exigency. State v. Enyart, 2010 Ohio 5623, 2010 Ohio App. LEXIS 4740 (10th Dist. November 18, 2010):

[*P26] Here, as in Jenkins and Chamber, two patrol officers knocked loudly on defendant’s doors and announced “police” before the detectives from the sexual assault squad arrived and interviewed the neighborhood girls. (Tr. 15-16, 140.) The officers, however, did not create the exigent circumstances with their knocking. Having been informed of what the girls related to their mother, the officers knew that, after the girls discovered the video camera, defendant went into the bathroom, shut the door, and inevitably would have realized the girls discovered the camera: someone was aware of his criminal behavior. The information the girls supplied, coupled with the readily destructible nature of the evidence, justified the officers’ entry.

[*P27] As a result, unlike Chamber or Jenkins, where police’s knocking created the exigency by alerting the defendant to the officers’ presence, here the girls’ discovery of the camera, with defendant’s knowledge they had done so, created the likelihood that defendant would try to destroy the recording. As Kaeppner explained, “[i]f the camera was on *** we’re talking about electronic data which is easily erased. It’s readily destructible.” (Tr. 125.) Cf. State v. Bowe (1988), 52 Ohio App.3d 112, 114 (concluding VCRs, cameras and radios were “not of a type easily destroyed, and the record [did] not reflect any indication that the police thought otherwise”); United States v. Bates (C.A.6, 1996), 84 F.3d 790, 796 (determining officers were unreasonable in thinking “fifteen kilograms of powder cocaine could be quickly disposed of by flushing it down the toilet or dumping it down the sink drain”).