Christopher Bryan McKenzie had been charged with crimes involving seven victims, but one boy was unable to make it back from South Africa to testify against the defendant, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown.
One victim told Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue how the abuse affected his life.
“I was addicted to hard drugs by the age of 18 and had almost overdosed numerous times before becoming homeless at the age of 22 due to my actions,” he said. “So much time of my life was wasted away, and I had put my mother through much heartache. I cry sometimes thinking back to all those phone calls she must have received… I am now 28 and drug free, proudly knowing how I had battled each addiction away, one by one.”
A victim’s brother had harsh words for the defendant.
“I cannot put into words the feelings I felt when my brother first told me what you did to him,” the sibling said.
“To this day, it is still very much affecting him in life, and I hope after today my brother and all the other victims can delete the memories of the horrible things you did to them and move on and live a happy life,” the brother added. “As for you, Chris McKenzie, you are a monster and I will never forgive you for what you did. Sadly, the punishment for monsters like you is not enough. You should at the very least be castrated.”
Donahue noted how the defendant abused the trust he earned from the victims and their parents.
“You used that trust to repeatedly abuse those children,” the judge said.
The sentence “ensures you will never be released from custody and will never be able to hurt anyone in the future,” Donahue said.
McKenzie taught Sunday school at Christ Church by the Sea in Newport Beach from 2004 to 2006 and at Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa. He met three of his victims through Rock Harbor, one through Christ Church by the Sea, two through relatives and one at his apartment complex in Costa Mesa, according to Brown.
McKenzie also worked as a pool cleaner in Orange County, and he hired several of the victims as helpers, Brown said. In many of the cases, while on a job with one of the boys, he would show the youth a “note” he said was left on his car from an artist offering to pay the children to pose nude for a sculpture, Brown said.
When he got some of the boys alone, he rubbed them down with baby oil to get them aroused for the photos, the prosecutor said.
When one of the boys was working as an assistant on a pool-cleaning job and kicked a container full of chlorine, McKenzie “washed (the victim) down,” then told the youth he had received a letter from a sculptor who said the boy “had a really good body for sculpture,” Brown said.
“He convinced (the victim) this wasn’t weird, it was for art,” she told jurors.
The victims were all younger than 14, and the incidents happened between March 1995 and January 2012, Brown said.
The prosecutor said that when one boy refused the defendant’s advances, McKenzie said, “Are you ashamed of the body God gave you?”
The defendant paid the boys about $50 to pose in the nude for photos, according to Brown, who said investigators found about 350 images on McKenzie’s computer of children engaging in sex acts with adults and other children.
— Staff and wire reports