A 41-year-old Austin man admitted Thursday to a federal judge that in August, he tried to entice an 11-year-old girl to have sex with him through a conversation on Facebook’s Messenger app.
Brian Eugene Newman sat in a courtroom facing U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson with his head in his hands as Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristin Bryant read aloud a lengthy narrative of the facts she would have tried to prove to a jury if the case had gone to trial.
Newman, accompanied by defense attorney LaTrece Gray, then acknowledged that what Bryant said was true, and Wilson accepted his guilty plea to a charge of attempted enticement of a minor — a charge that is punishable by 10 years to life in federal prison, where parole is unavailable.
Wilson will sentence Newman on June 27 after a presentence investigation is conducted.
Bryant told the judge that the FBI was contacted Aug. 15 by the Ward Police Department after a woman reported that Newman, whom she knew, had made inappropriate comments to her 11-year-old granddaughter, who showed her the text messages.
The girl, who barely knew Newman, blocked him from her Facebook account after receiving the messages, in which he offered to take her on a motorcycle ride and told her that the last time he saw her, “I seriously liked how those pants fit you, especially in the front.”
But the FBI agent took over the girl’s Facebook account and restarted the conversation with Newman, according to court documents.
Pretending to be the girl, the agent reopened the conversation by apologizing for shutting him out earlier and saying she was “freaked out” by the conversation but didn’t want him to get in trouble. Then she asked why he liked her pants, and he replied that she was “very sexy.”
The agent responded, “OMG, you’re so bad,” and then continued the conversation.
Court documents say Newman told the girl, among other things, that he hoped to be the first person she kisses.
The documents said that a short time later, the agent sent a text indicating the girl had arrived at her grandmother’s house, and that Newman replied by saying he might drive to a cemetery behind the grandmother’s house. He asked if the girl could sneak out to see him when her grandparents went to sleep.
After she agreed, he replied, “I dare you not to wear any underwear.”
Though the girl was actually nowhere in the vicinity, FBI agents and Ward police detectives waited in the cemetery for Newman. When they saw his pickup, they activated their blue lights, which Bryant said prompted Newman to speed away, throwing his phone, an unwrapped condom and a bottle of lubricant, among other things, out the window as he drove. Bryant told the judge that the officers recovered the items, and that Newman wasn’t wearing any underwear when he was arrested.
In an earlier hearing, the FBI agent testified that two other girls had made reports about Newman in the past, and that police in Pennsylvania were preparing an arrest warrant for Newman in connection with one of those reports. Those cases weren’t mentioned in Thursday’s plea hearing.
