Judge Samuel Cappas sentenced Michael McGregor Tuesday to seven years in a plea deal for a string of burglaries. He faced up to nine years.
Before he did, defense lawyer John Cantrell asked for leniency. Back in December 2018, McGregor and friends burglarized Aaron Saldana’s house.
At the time, McGregor, then 18, was a Calumet New Tech High School student who detested Saldana, saying he was a “creep,” Cantrell said.
Saldana had worked at Calumet New Tech for about a decade as an instructional aide and ran the middle school’s photography club.
What McGregor and friend Scott T. Porta II found inside was a stash of child pornography, including a photo album, plus videos that were clearly filmed in the home’s bathroom.
“We really didn’t know what to do,” McGregor said later in the hearing.
Cappas rejected this, saying McGregor’s life was littered with various burglary, gun and drug crimes and he had little to do with how Saldana ultimately was caught.
“I don’t see him as the hero you are portraying,” the judge told Cantrell.
McGregor would serve six years in the Indiana Department of Corrections, with the final year in Lake County’s Community Corrections program.
Now 23, he pleaded guilty May 21 to burglary, a Level 4 felony.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Deputy Prosecutor Bradley Carter noted McGregor had 10 police “contacts,” three juvenile adjudications, and two prior felonies. McGregor picked up a half-dozen other charges while the burglary cases were pending. McGregor had another case about to be charged, Carter said.
Court filings show McGregor was charged Tuesday with prisoner possessing a deadly weapon, a Level 4 felony, after guards found a sharp “metal shank” during a jail cell search on Monday. Another inmate, 17, was also charged in the sweep.
Carter asked for nine years.
Cantrell countered McGregor had a “couple of sleepless nights” before he basically “put himself in jail” when he told someone else what he found at Saldana’s house, who went to the cops. Saldana was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and McGregor had helped “expose a child predator.”
Saldana’s case may have been charged in federal court if McGregor had not burglarized it first and connected the cases, the lawyer argued.
He asked for time served.
Carter argued McGregor had blackmailed Saldana afterward, leading Saldana to burn some of the pictures in an outdoor grill and weakening their case against him.
It was a situation where “18-year-old kids were figuring out what to do,” Cantrell said.
“I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes after this,” McGregor told Cappas. “A lot of (it was) due to drugs.”
He was “shook” when he saw the child porn, McGregor said. “(Saldana) was like a father figure to a lot of students.”
Cantrell asked Cappas to not “give (him) a worse sentence than Saldana.” The judge replied McGregor already got a break with his plea.
During the Lake County case, McGregor was arrested in October 2020 on a federal gun charge. He pleaded guilty and later got time served a year later, records show.
Cappas at first gave McGregor a seven-year prison sentence. McGregor told him that he had tried to get help for drugs after he was released from federal custody.
The judge changed the final year to community corrections.
According to Post-Tribune archives, the pair found the photo album under Saldana’s bed with “over 100 sheets of Polaroid photos of young boys in various states of undress,” according to the affidavit. They also found a bucket containing a “bunch of USB drives” on the nightstand next to the bed, taking three, the affidavit states.
He was “was sickened by what he saw” on the flash drives, according to the affidavit. The videos contained young boys in Saldana’s bathroom. He also recognized Saldana’s voice and wristwatch in the videos, according to the affidavit.
Saldana made a burglary report on Dec. 12, 2018, reporting that an Xbox, iPhone, Ruger 9 mm handgun and three rifles were stolen, court records state.
Investigators executed a search warrant later at Saldana’s residence where officers found a smoking grill with “ashes appearing to be photograph paper and remnants of what appeared to be partially melted photograph negatives” inside, the affidavit states. Police also found “more partially melted negatives in a tin can,” according to the affidavit.
Police also found the photo album under Saldana’s bed, and while “there were no photographs in it,” there “appeared to be hundreds of photograph negative strips,” the affidavit states.
Porta was sentenced to one year of probation for residential entry, a Level 6 felony, in 2021.
mcolias@post-trib.com