PLAIN CITY, Utah, April 11, 2019 (Gephardt Daily) — Officials are still reviewing video tapes seized after a Plain City man was charged in March with sexually abusing a boy he was assigned to mentor more than a dozen years earlier.
Bart Duane Fife, 56, is charged with 10 first-degree felonies, five for sodomy on a child and five for aggravated sexual abuse of a child by a person in a position of trust.
The charges stem from incidents alleged to have occurred in 2004 and 2005 when the victim, now an adult, was 9 and 10 years old.
The victim told law enforcement officials in 2017 that he had been abused by Fife, with whom he was paired in an adult-child mentorship program.
“The victim disclosed that the abuse started after he caught Bart watching a pornographic video,” says a probable cause statement filed by an officer of the Weber County Sheriff’s Office.
The victim said that after that incident, Fife touched him inappropriately, and subjected him to sexual acts. Fife invited the victim to sleep over, and the victim awoke several times to find a sexual act being performed on him without consent, the statement says.
“The victim described a video that had another male from the mentorship program,” the statement says. “The existence of that video was corroborated by another male who had seen part of the video, and corroborated by the person filmed in the video.”
The mentorship program confirmed to law enforcement that the victim and Fife were matched together between March 2004 and November 2005.
Fife was interviewed at the Weber County Sheriff’s Office, the statement says. post Miranda, “Bart confessed to abusing the victim.”
According to a search warrant served on Fife’s home, investigators hoped to locate the video the victim caught Fife watching, which was believed to be a homemade video recorded on a VHS tape.
Detectives seized more than 760 video tapes and more than 175 DVDs, and continue screening the recordings in hopes of finding the described footage.
Fife was released after arranging to pay a $200,000 bond.
