Ex-Costa Mesa church volunteer convicted of sexually abusing boys

A former Costa Mesa Sunday school volunteer was convicted Wednesday of sexually assaulting five boys and trying to abuse a sixth.

Christopher McKenzie, 51, didn’t react, looking on steadily as a jury’s guilty verdicts on 20 felony counts were read in Orange County Superior Court. The charges included multiple counts of lewd acts with children under 14, using a minor for sex acts, distributing pornography to a minor and single counts of possession of child pornography, attempted lewd acts on a child under 14 and attempted using a minor for sex acts.

McKenzie originally faced more accusations, but a seventh alleged victim was unable to attend the trial, prosecutors said.

He now could face more than 100 years to life in prison at his Sept. 4 sentencing.

McKenzie met three of the boys at Rock Harbor church in Costa Mesa and often got close to his victims by offering them money to help him at his job cleaning pools around Orange County, according to prosecutors.

During the weeks-long trial, McKenzie’s accusers testified about how he groomed them for abuse by seeing movies with them, buying them fast food or paying them to watch pornography with him.

According to prosecutors, some of them came to view him as a father figure, despite abuse that included touching their genitals and, in one case, oral copulation and sodomy.

Multiple victims testified that McKenzie used a story about an artist needing a nude model to persuade them to pose naked for photos in his apartment.

During some of the photo shoots, McKenzie would rub the boys with oil and touch their genitals, prosecutors said.

The charges of attempted abuse stemmed from a boy who refused to pose for the pictures, despite McKenzie asking if he was “ashamed of the body God gave (him),” prosecutor Heather Brown said.

Some of the abuse dated to 1996 and involved a boy McKenzie repeatedly molested and raped from the time he was 8 until he was 16, prosecutors said.

Police arrested McKenzie in 2012 after a man walked into the Newport Beach Police Department with allegations that McKenzie had abused him when he was a boy.

Authorities said they found hundreds of images of children in sexual situations on McKenzie’s computer when they searched his Costa Mesa apartment.