A Burnsville man who took hundreds of pictures of unwitting girls' thighs and panties at playgrounds, the Minnesota Zoo and other public places must serve five months in jail and a decade on strict probation, a judge ordered Thursday.
Dean Lindo, 39, also received a two-year prison sentence, but Judge Thomas Bibus stayed that term, as long as Lindo carries out conditions of his probation over the next 10 years.
Those include allowing authorities to randomly audit his computer and having no contact with anyone under age 18, except his son, without approval.
The 20-point list also bans Lindo from possessing a camera or a cellphone with a camera around children in public places, unless he gets approval from Dakota County Community Corrections.
Lindo had been charged with five counts of "interference with privacy," a felony, for holding a camera and cellphone underneath tables to photograph girls' intimate parts and for using other secretive methods to take photographs, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dakota County District Court.
A police investigation began a year ago after a father who had taken his daughters to the Robert Trail Library in Rosemount noticed a man behaving suspiciously.
After his girls stood to leave a computer table, the father saw the man, seated nearby, pull his hands from under the table. He was holding a camera and cellphone, and the father demanded to see them. The father handed the items to a library employee and called 911.
Police took the camera and spoke to Lindo, who admitted that there were inappropriate photos on the camera. Police turned up 675 such images on the camera and its memory card and another 23, apparently of a neighborhood girl or girls, on the cellphone.
