Doyle Murphy
Dojo Pizza owner Loren Copp, shown here at his dojo/pizzeria/residence in Bevo Mill, took pornographic photos of underage girls, prosecutors say.
The 47-year-old former pastor was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of making and possessing child pornography.
Prosecutors claim Copp photographed or videotaped five girls during a six-year span that ended in October when law enforcement officers raided the former Bevo Mill church where he taught karate, operated a pizzeria and took in a handful of teens whose parents were in jail, addicted to drugs or just couldn’t take care of them.
See Also: The Curious Case of Dojo Pizza
The four-count indictment bumps up the number of victims from a single “Jane Doe” listed in a complaint when Copp was arrested on April 7.
Investigators recovered the disturbing images from a pair of Hitachi hard drives following raids in October and November, authorities say. The pictures included a shot of a prepubescent girl bound with rope and a collage of photos of a girl wearing a spiked collar and crying as she engaged in a variety of sex acts with a grown man, according to the indictment. The court records didn’t specify whether the bound girl or the girl in the collage were one of the Jane Does.
Copp was the subject of a Riverfront Times cover story in December. In interviews, he had claimed the law enforcement investigation — originally described in a search warrant affidavit as an inquiry into labor trafficking — was the result of a biased cop and a bitter feud with a woman who had been forced to leave Dojo Pizza.
The city shut down his building in October for a series of code violations, including allegations he was running an illegal rooming house. Copp insisted there was no rooming house — just a home he shared with two teens whom he called his “daughters” and two others he was helping out. He has maintained his innocence in the months since.
He held a community meeting in February to dispute allegations of trafficking and abuse, and he has frequently turned to Facebook to rail against what he claimed was a serious injustice.
On April 5, less than 48 hours before he was arrested, he posted a long message, describing the good he could have been doing if it weren’t for the investigation.
“These people can say, do, make me into what ever they want but at the end of day I will go to my maker knowing I was doing right,” he wrote.
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