Crime & Safety

Cops: Voyeur's Spy Camera Was Found Under Sink

Documents filed in state Superior Court in Stamford regarding the arrest of Marco Dias show details of the voyeurism charges against him; his bond was not reduced Friday at his arraignment.

A driver for Garda Armored Car Service noticed an odd device under a sink when he was using the bathroom at Subway restaurant at 22 Heights Road on Monday.

By Thursday, the camera found in the bathroom had led to , 21, of Bridgeport, who appeared in court early Friday afternoon for a bail hearing that resulted in no decrease in his $50,000 bond.

Even if he paid the bond, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has already notified law enforcement officials that they would hold him as a suspected illegal alien if the court releases him.

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Dias has been living in the United States for the past 12 years, a bail commissioner said at Dias' arraignment Friday in state Superior Court in Stamford. That would mean Dias had entered the country when he was about 9 years old.

The bail commissioner told Judge Kenneth B. Povotador that Dias was "recently separated."

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The commissioner recommended that Dias be released on a conditional promise to appear in court, the condition being that he stay away from any victims. A prosecutor asked that the $25,000 bond amount already set for Dias not be changed.

Attorney Alex Martinez of Stamford told the judge that with federal immigration authorities already putting a "hold" on Dias' possible release, he would reserve his bond arguments for another time. Povodator then set Aug. 31 as Dias' next court date, with bail unchanged.

The armored car driver said the small black and silver colored device looked like a computer thumb drive at first, but when he removed it from under the sink he saw that it appeared to be a tiny video camera, according to an arrest warrant affidavit Darien police applied for on Thursday.

"I looked to my left at the sink and noticed a black and silver item," the driver wrote in a statement for police. "This item appeared to be placed in a slit of the foam insulation surrounding the drain pipe for the sink. [...] I looked at the item and then pulled it out of the insulation. It appeared to be a thumb drive with a clear lense on the end."

The arrest warrant application, written by Detective Chester Perkowski, gave the following account of the police investigation (no accusations in the police account have been proven at this point in court):

The driver took the camera with him when he left the restaurant, and his supervisor called police.

Perkowski found on the Internet that the camera is meant to look like a regular USB thumb drive and has a built-in rechargeable battery. "It could be set to motion activate, and the video is stored on a micro-SD card," Perkowski wrote.

Police found five video files stored in the device. The first two showed a man later identified as Dias placing the camera and adjusting it so that it would show people using the toilet. (A photo from this video file is attached to this article.)

The second video shows Dias making more adjustments to the camera, then urinating in the toilet.

The third and fourth videos show two different men using the toilet. The camera was placed in a way that showed the men's private parts. The fifth and last video shows a woman using the toilet. Her private parts are also exposed.

After police made a still photo from one of the first two video files, showing a man adjusting the camera, a police officer recognized the man as an employee of Subway who worked at both the one at 22 Heights Rd. in Noroton Heights and another Subway restaurant in town, at 879 Post Rd. in downtown Darien.

On Thursday, two Darien police detectives watched the parking lot of Subway and arrested Dias when they identified him as the man adjusting the camera in the video.

"It is common practice for individuals that partake in this type of voeuristic activities to save these videos to computer hard drives, DVD's, thumb drives, etc. and usually tend to have quite a large collection used for sexual gratification as well as trading the files with other individuals interested in voyeuristic activities," Perkowski wrote in the affidavit.

Dias' interest, based on the angle of the camera, appeared to be directed toward seeing male genitals, Perkowski wrote.

Editor's note: This article originally was published at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 3 by Darien Patch. The time stamp has been changed for layout purposes on the Home page.


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