Ex-California Homeland Security employee gets 8 years in prison for molesting young girls

Terry Edward Keegan was convicted of molesting two girls in Irvine, inappropriately touching a third girl and destroying evidence prior to his arrest

A former Department of Homeland Security employee who molested two girls in Irvine, inappropriately touched a third girl and destroyed evidence prior to his arrest was sentenced Wednesday to eight years in prison.

Terry Edward Keegan, now 59, targeted a vulnerable girl who lived with Keegan and his girlfriend, as well as two of her friends, by inappropriately touching them and taking photos of them, Orange County Superior Court Judge Andre Manssourian noted prior to announcing the prison sentence.

The judge also cited the trust other parents had in Keegan due to his work with Homeland Security, as well as his background working with the Transportation Security Administration and as a reserve deputy for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

“It turns out the fox was guarding the hen house, and undoubtedly the defendant took advantage of a position of trust,” Manssourian said.

One of the victims told the judge that at the time of the abuse she felt like she was alone and responsible for what was happening. She added that Keegan “knew exactly what he was doing.”

“I was young and vulnerable and I was taken advantage of,” the teen said. “We were children and the man who was supposed to be protecting us hurt us.”

The now-teen’s current legal guardian told the judge that while the accusations against Keegan seemed “antithetical” to the caring, compassionate person she had known for years, she had no reason to doubt that the girl’s descriptions of the abuse were accurate.

The first accusation against Keegan surfaced in 2016, according to court documents, when a girl told a doctor that Keegan inappropriately touched her when she visited a friend. But those accusations were apparently not investigated at the time.

In 2021, the girl who lived with Keegan and a different friend, who were both 16 at the time, spent time with Keegan over spring break. The friend later told her mother that Keegan made inappropriate comments, touched her buttocks and insisted on taking the girls shopping for bathing suits.

Authorities contacted the girl who lived with Keegan, who told them that he routinely slapped her “jokingly” on the buttocks, photographed her in bathing suits and that on one occasion years earlier had slipped his tongue into her mouth while kissing her goodnight.

Keegan denied having any inappropriate contact with the girls. But after being contacted by police he began routinely checking a law enforcement database for any warrants taken out against him. And police later found a broken hard drive and broken USB memory stick in a trash can outside Keegan’s home.

“One wonders what was on those hard drives,” Manssourian said during the sentencing hearing, describing the destruction of the computer equipment as a “cloud that hangs over this case.”

The judge said he did not find Keegan’s testimony, and his denial of wrongdoing, as being credible. Keegan’s defense attorney described him as a “quirky guy” whose actions may have been misinterpreted.

“Maybe you are odd, quirky and strange, but there is a lot more to it,” the judge told Keegan.

An Orange County Superior Court jury found Keegan guilty of a felony count of lewd acts with a child and misdemeanor counts of child annoyance, sexual battery, battery and destruction of evidence.

But the jury also acquitted him of a half-dozen other felonies, including continuous sexual abuse of a child and multiple other counts of lewd acts with a minor. Had Keegan been convicted as charged he would have faced more than 20 years in prison.