Monster gets 120 years in prison for livestreaming sexual abuse of his daughter
A depraved Iowa man was sentenced to 120 years behind bars for repeatedly sexually abusing his daughter — from infancy to 6 years old — and even raping her live on the internet, according to authorities and new reports.
Steven Douglas Crook Jr., 29, of Bloomfield, pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual exploitation of a child and received the maximum penalty Monday in connection with the disturbing crimes, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa said in a Tuesday statement.
Crook sexually abused the girl — sometimes violently — from the time she was an infant until law enforcement rescued her from the home in March 2018, when she was 6, according to the statement.
He took photos and videos of the abuse, and sometimes livestreamed it using the popular app Live.me, prosecutors said. He even allegedly encouraged his followers to watch him rape the helpless girl online.
Authorities discovered electronic devices in Crook’s possession that held videos of the abuse, according to a criminal complaint obtained by the Des Moines Register. Disturbingly, one folder on a storage card bore the label “child porn and baby rape,” the complaint said.
“Any time a child is abused in Iowa, if we have photographs or videos of the abuse, the defendant can be prosecuted in federal court, and face decades, if not life, behind bars,” US Attorney Marc Krickbaum said in the statement. “Steven Crook will spend the rest of his life in federal prison, where he belongs. We want to make sure that other defendants like him, who are a threat to our children, face the stiffest penalties federal law allows.”
“In this case, sexual abuse went undetected for years because family members failed to report it to authorities,” he added.
US District Judge Stephanie M. Rose described Crook’s crimes as horrific — and blasted his efforts to hide the crimes for years as “insidious,” “thoughtful” and “manipulative.”
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Meanwhile, the little girl’s mom, Kendra Hoover, has also been charged — as prosecutors charge that she left her daughter alone with Crook even after she saw a video of the horrific abuse, local station KTVO reported.
Hoover faces more than a dozen state charges of neglect and child endangerment, and will go on trial in December.
