James Hockenbury pleads guilty to criminal sex act with child

ALBANY — Former childcare provider James Hockenbury of Guilderland Center pleaded guilty in Albany County Court on Monday to engaging in oral sexual conduct with a then-3-year-old child he was babysitting.

Hockenbury, 49, faces 10 years in state prison, to be followed by 20 years of post-release supervision, when he is sentenced on July 10 by Judge Peter A. Lynch.

A trial had been scheduled to begin on June 5. Hockenbury, in December, turned down an offer from the Albany County District Attorney’s Office of “about 12 years” in prison, his attorney, Mark J. Sacco of Sacco Tyner, told The Enterprise at the time.

Sacco had argued in a pretrial hearing on April 26 that a confession his client had signed during an interview with an Albany Police detective should not be admitted into evidence, and that Hockenbury’s electronic devices had been seized unlawfully, and that any evidence found on them should be inadmissible.

Lynch decided on May 3 that all of those items could be admitted into evidence.

Hockenbury pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual act, a felony.

In his signed statement, Hockenbury admitted to taking a young Albany boy whom he was babysitting to the playground at Westmere Elementary School on April 16, a Saturday, when the school was closed. Soon after reaching the school grounds, Hockenbury said, he had urinated outside, and the boy approached and observed him. At that point, Hockenbury’s statement said, he encouraged the boy to touch and then lick his penis, which the child briefly did.

In the statement, Hockenbury spoke of his shame and said that that boy was the only child he had ever abused.

In the pretrial hearing on April 26, Andrew Tarpinian, the same Albany Police detective who originally interviewed Hockenbury, said that another child had come forward with his parents on June 7, 2016 to say that Hockenbury had also molested him; the boy was, Tarpinian testified, “3-and-a-half or 4.”

According to the Albany Police Department’s application for a search warrant for the electronic devices, the second child said that Hockenbury, whom he called Mr. Jim, would play tag with him, but that Mr. Jim’s rules were that tagging could only occur with a touch or tag of the private area. The child said he was made to look at and touch Mr. Jim’s penis, according to the search warrant application, and that Mr. Jim had taken naked pictures of him with a camera and with a cell phone.

Hockenbury had spent 30 years working with children, including at the University at Albany’s UKids Child Care Center; at Guilderland’s Maple Leaf Child Care; as a Guilderland town camp counselor; and as a monitor for Pine Bush, Guilderland, and Lynnwood elementary schools, all in the Guilderland school district. He and his wife, Debbie, had also previously run a day-care center out of their Guilderland Center home.

At the pretrial hearing, it had emerged that Guilderland Police had held onto Hockenbury’s computers for two months without ever examining them for child pornography. No search of their contents was ever done until Albany Police got a warrant to take the computers from Guilderland, after the second child came forward to accuse Hockenbury.

Deputy Chief Curtis Cox of the Guilderland Police told The Enterprise on Wednesday that the electronics had been seized “as a routine part of investigations of this type.” He said that the reason the department had never gotten a warrant to search the computers was because the department lacked any evidence in its case, involving the first victim, that would enable the police to get a search warrant — Guilderland Police lacked, for instance, any talk of photographs taken or cameras used.

Spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office Cecilia Walsh was asked on Wednesday if she thinks Hockenbury will ever be charged in the case of the second child to come forward. She responded in an email, “The guilty plea entered by Hockenbury fully satisfies any uncharged acts in relation to the second victim.”

The case was prosecuted by Jennifer McCanney of the Special Victims Unit of the district attorney’s office.

Updated on May 16. The comments from Curtis Cox and Cecilia Walsh were added.

 

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