Man pleads guilty to exposing self to children near park
A man pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a child Monday for exposing himself to two children near a Glen Ellyn park.
In exchange for his plea, Matthew T. Morgan was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 30 months of sex offender probation.
Charges in two other cases ‒ where he was accused of secretly videotaping women and children in the dressing room of a Goodwill store in Downers Grove and a Starbucks in Hinsdale ‒ were dropped as part of the plea agreement, according to DuPage County court records.
Morgan, 37, lives in the 0-100 block of Fourth Street in Downers Grove.
In the Glen Ellyn case, he was accused of exposing his genitals and touching himself in front of two girls, ages 9 and 11, around 4 p.m. Sept. 6 near Sunset Park.
The girls were walking home from school and heard a man’s voice. Morgan told the girls something had fallen out of one of their backpacks and into nearby bushes, which caused the girls to look in another direction. When they looked back, he was touching himself, authorities said. According to court records, Morgan told police he was urinating.
In the Downers Grove and Hinsdale cases, he was charged with felony unauthorized video recording. Authorities said that on Oct. 6, he put his phone underneath a 13-year-old girl's dress at a Starbucks in Hinsdale while pretending to tie his shoes. They also alleged that he secretly recorded a woman using a changing room at a Goodwill store in Downers Grove. When he was arrested, there were about 260 videos on his phone of recordings of young females in stores, according to police. He was put on electronic home monitoring because the charges were not eligible for pretrial detention.
Glen Ellyn police saw a notice about his arrest, checked the phone Downers Grove police had confiscated, and saw it contained directions to Sunset Park. He was detained pretrial on the Glen Ellyn case.
Morgan was required to serve 50% of his sentence, and since he had been in the county jail since Nov. 30, he was released Monday morning.