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By Erin Tiernan
August 7, 2018
Christopher Barlow has previously faced charges of impersonating a Homeland Security officer and amassing weapons and explosives in his Duxbury home. Earlier this year police in Connecticut charged him with secretly recording ambulance patients while volunteering as an EMT while at college.
PLYMOUTH — A Duxbury man who earlier this year was charged with taking inappropriate pictures of patients while he was volunteering on an ambulance in Connecticut is now accused of secretly recording and photographing underage girls in Massachusetts.
A Plymouth County grand jury indicted Christopher Barlow, 21, of Duxbury on 58 charges including extortion, possession of child pornography, posing or exhibiting a child in a state of nudity, secretly recording or photographing a nude person and disseminating visual material of a child in a state of nudity or sexual conduct.
Prosecutors say Barlow secretly recorded and took photos of four underage girls in various states of undress between December 2014 and June 2017 and shared the digital files hundreds of times.
Barlow also tried to extort two of the victims, telling them he had uploaded their images to a porn website and would continue to share their images online unless they sent him more images of themselves, according to a statement from District Attorney Timothy Cruz’s office.
It’s unclear where the images and videos were recorded or where the victims are from.
Barlow has a lengthy history with the courts. Last October, he was indicted on charges of impersonating a Homeland Security officer and illegal-weapons charges after police say he presented a fake badge to Duxbury police.
Police obtained a search warrant for his home, where they seized two long guns, a handgun, parts to build additional guns, large-capacity magazines, boxes of ammunition, chemicals that could be used to make explosives and several stolen pieces of equipment, including handheld radios, a defibrillator and medical bags full of supplies.
It was during this search in June 2017 that police seized the electronics on which the images of the underage girls and Barlow’s alleged communications with them were discovered.
Duxbury police first began investigating Barlow in 2016 after they were contacted by police in Easton, Connecticut, about chemicals, ammunition and a gun case found in a storage locker at a fire station where Barlow had been volunteering while attending college. The FBI became involved in the investigations with Connecticut and Massachusetts police following Barlow’s claims that he was a Homeland Security officer.
In March, Barlow was arrested on new charges – including voyeurism and stealing a firearm – after Connecticut police said they found evidence he was taking inappropriate images of patients in ambulances and that he had placed a hidden camera in the bathroom of the fire department’s headquarters and stole two guns from a co-worker there.
Barlow’s attorney, Michael Bergeron, has said that the old charges come from a period in 2017 when Barlow was experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations, which a judge’s notes filed in Plymouth Superior Court indicate may have been the result of an anesthesia overdose in 2016.
Calls to Bergeron’s Duxbury office were not returned Tuesday afternoon.
After his arrest last year in Massachusetts, Barlow spent several weeks at Bridgewater State Hospital under court order. After receiving treatment and medication there, Barlow was found competent by Plymouth County Judge Brian Davis in February and was released on $2,500 bail.
He has been living at a relative’s home in Kingston under GPS monitoring.
Reach Erin Tiernan at [email protected] or 617-786-7320. Follow her on Twitter @ErinTiernan.