ILOILO CITY -- The American national arrested here for sex crimes in his country entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to a 30-year imprisonment.
David Wayne Altman Greth, 39, gets a 30-year sentence on three cases with a total of 23 counts as filed in Portsmouth, Virginia alone.
Greth will only serve 23 years because seven of the 30 years were suspended. However, granting he fully serves all 23 years, more sex charges await him in North Carolina.
Greth was primarily charged for 11 sexual offenses, including rape, two counts of child abuse, two counts of aggravated sexual battery and three counts of forcible sodomy.
A native of Portsmouth, Virginia, Greth gained notoriety and was even a featured criminal in “America’s Most Wanted.”
His hometown newspaper Virginia Examiner dubbed him as “one of the worst types of criminals.”
Greth managed to flee the US before the issuance of arrest warrants and went into hiding in the Philippines. He arrived in the country in August 4, 2006.
He stayed for some time in Bacolod City and Capiz, where he had assumed different identities. He finally settled in Iloilo City to work as an English tutor in a Korean school.
While in Iloilo, he used aliases such as David Altman, Robert Kline, George Altman and Kevin Altman in his Facebook account and visited porn sites with preferred "friends" based in Iloilo City.
He managed to have numerous girlfriends and left one pregnant upon his arrest in December.
Greth denied this, saying: “I did not touch any kid here in the Philippines. Of course, I have girlfriends, but I did not do anything wrong here…”
He also gained “popularity” among the commercial sex workers in the city’s Molo District who knew him by his aliases.
The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Western Visayas Regional Office arrested Greth after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation sought its assistance upon reports the fugitive was in Iloilo.
NBI-Western Visayas Director Elfren Meneses worked closely on Greth’s case, which he said was “one successful joint operation done in the presence of officials of the United States Embassy.”
“Greth’s capture is yet another example of what we can do as a community. While we certainly value the presence of our American visitors and other foreign guests in the Philippines, the likes of Greths have no place in our society. The bureau is and will always be a partner of the US Government and other governments in pursuit of justice,” Meneses said. (Sunnex)
