A New York man faces charges that he took upskirt photos of women going in and out of a rather posh Newbury Street chain clothing store in Boston last summer.
Police report the 49-year-old suspect’s phone “captured many images of the private areas of unsuspecting women.”
Damon Deteso, of Saratoga Springs, New York, but originally from Massachusetts, will face a total of 36 charges — just listing them all took up half of the 20-page complaint filed in December. He is set to be arraigned Wednesday at Boston Municipal Court Central Division.
Police say that Deteso on Sept. 24, 2021, took candid photographs of 36 women. He either secretly followed them up Newbury and Fairfield streets and surreptitiously recorded them with his phone hanging half out of his backpack, a charging document states, or by sitting on the stairs outside a clothing chain store in the 200-block of Newbury Street.
Sitting outside the store, police allege, he placed the cellphone on the steps and captured women who had to step over it as they went up to or down from shopping at the store.
Investigators allege that 21 of these photographs or recordings successfully captured images of the women’s private parts — that means 21 counts of secret sexual surveillance. A further 15 shots failed to capture the sights Deteso was allegedly after and are being charged as attempted crimes.
The women are not identified in the complaint but are only referred to by certain articles of clothing — a red dress, a blue striped dress and several black skirts, for example — as to maintain a distinct listing of victims for the charges.
Deteso, smartly dressed in a charcoal button-up and blue jeans when picked up by police that September day, was picked up for questioning because officers say he fit the description a woman gave them and also matched a photo of the suspect in another upskirt complaint about a month earlier.
But officers say he did have that cellphone opportunely placed in the partially unzipped lower pocket of his Under Armour backpack, with the camera facing up.
The detective who reviewed the videos on the phone wrote that the earliest ones were of Deteso manipulating the phone in the pocket so it would be placed just right.
“The victims in these videos and images are clothed normally and are completely unaware that they are being recorded as they walk around Newbury St. conducting every day [sic] activities,” the criminal complaint states. “It is apparent by their clothing and their complete unawareness of the suspect, that they believed that their intimate body parts were not and should not have been visible to the public.”
Deteso’s Saratoga Springs home, records show, is valued by Zillow at more than $1.2 million.
