‘I love you’ and ‘you are sexy’. Darius Z. from Valkenswaard sent those messages to a 10-year-old girl. And that went on and on, as it turned out in the court in Den Bosch on Monday. Z., now 27, sent dick pics and received nude photos of the girl.
Darius Z. nervously shifted in his seat opposite the three judges. On Monday morning he had to answer for a very dark period in his life, when he sought sex contact with a girl of only 10 years old as ‘Polly’.
He was heavily addicted to cocaine and alcohol in 2021, it turned out, and did not take it all very seriously. “I was obsessively looking for attention from women at the time,” he said. But one of his online ‘dates’ was a 10-year-old girl from Belgium. That did not immediately become apparent, because she was also logged in to a dating app for adults. But that became apparent a short time later.
‘Very inappropriate’
Especially when the girl started sending photos of herself after Darius Z. asked, it should have been clear to Darius Z. that the girl was very young. He should also have understood that their contact was very inappropriate, the prosecutor believed.
And Z. admitted that too. He kept quiet all the time with the police, but this Monday he wanted to come clean and admitted all his mistakes. He has now been clean for almost a year and is determined not to fall back into old, bad habits.
More sex chats
“I snorted myself to death,” he said. “And when I was sober, I knew that the sexual contact with that girl was wrong and I deleted many of those messages. But I couldn’t control myself at the time and fled back into alcohol and drugs and then I made the mistake again.”
The Belgian girl was not only a victim of Z. but of several men. Her mother noticed in the summer of 2021 that she was becoming increasingly quiet and withdrawn. When she checked her daughter’s phone, she was shocked by the sex chats with men and the sexually explicit photos of her daughter and of the genitals of the men involved.
‘Not a pedophile’
The Belgian police transferred the fornication and grooming case to colleagues in the Netherlands. In April 2022, Darius Z. was arrested at his work in Boxtel. The man was shocked by this, but it took another year before he stopped his addictions.
At the hearing he presented himself as a different person. One who seems to have learned from his mistakes. He has been clean for 311 days and says he is not a pedophile. Contact with the girl was a big mistake, he admitted again and again.
Community service
And the public prosecutor also noticed this. “The gentleman had too little control over himself at the time. But I’m glad he hasn’t used it for so long.”
She demanded a community service order of 120 hours and another 120 hours of probation, which he must carry out if he commits another crime within two years. And because the guidelines do not allow only community service to be required in such sexual offense cases, she also asked for one day in prison.
The verdict in this case is on February 26.