A Navy officer has been accused of using chat programs to try and lure a person whom he believed to be a 14-year-old girl into meeting him for sex, federal court documents show.
Christopher Paul Hetherington, a 33-year-old lieutenant, was arrested Dec. 21. According to an affidavit filed in the case, he was stationed on the destroyer USS Ross as its weapons officer and had been selected for promotion to lieutenant commander.
The investigation, which began in late October, started looking into Hetherington when he allegedly responded to a post that an undercover agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service made on Whisper — an app that allows anonymous posting of photos and video. The Ross had just completed a homeport change to Norfolk from Rota, Spain, in early September.
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After the agent told the suspect she was in 9th grade, he moved the conversation to Snapchat where, according to the court document, his username was “sw0daddy” and he had “a display name of ‘Chris H.'”
This detail, among a few others, quickly led investigators to suspect they were dealing with a sailor.
“As a former Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) in the U.S. Navy, I know that ‘SWO' is short for Surface Warfare Officer,” the agent wrote in the affidavit.
She also noted that, at one point, the suspect said “he was wearing ‘coveralls,' which I…
