Former Alpharetta officer sentenced to 7 years for child pornography

John Hagen Allen, a former Alpharetta police officer, told a federal judge Tuesday that he never meant to hurt anyone and was sorry for the victims of “any and all” child sexual abuse material, including that which he pleaded guilty to distributing.

Allen, 41, was found in possession of more than 2,200 such images and videos, and was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison.

Allen also apologized to his family, saying he never meant to embarrass them, and added that he has been letting his own children know he’s “not a monster.”

“I was in a very dark spot,” said Allen, who was described by defense attorney Paul Kish as having suffered from traumatic experiences as a Marine in Iraq, with resulting consequences to his mental health. The attorney asked Chief U.S. District Judge Leigh May to impose the minimum 5-year sentence.

But while May acknowledged that Allen is a good father and has taken care of other relatives, the judge said his crime was not isolated to “just one dark time” in his life.

“This is not an accidental collection,” May said at the sentencing. “There are real victims here. The kids were being abused and tortured.”

The sentence effectively concluded a yearslong investigation that was delayed in part by an Alpharetta police detective’s failure to act on a tip about Allen’s crime in a timely manner.

Former Alpharetta police detective Laurie Nicholson was assigned an Internet Crimes Against Children “cyber tip” related to Allen in December 2019, but delayed pursuing the case for over a year, according to an internal police report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act.

Nicholson, who now is an officer in the Alpharetta Police’s Community Services division, says she “opened” an electronic file containing the tip in February 2021, realized she had a conflict of interest because she had a personal relationship with Allen’s family, and referred it to the FBI.

Nicholson had been Allen’s field training officer when he joined the department. She also knows his ex-wife personally, and attended their wedding. Allen worked for Alpharetta Police from 2007 to 2016, according to court papers filed by his lawyer.

John Robison, who was then Alpharetta’s police chief and now is its assistant city administrator and director of public safety, told the AJC that Nicholson was written up for not promptly investigating the tip.

Nicholson, in an interview with the AJC this week, said she can’t recall why she didn’t open the tip sooner, noting that 2020 was a “chaotic time for police work and the world.” She said she did not sit on the tip because of her relationship with the family. She added that she thinks Allen should have received a longer sentence.

“Is it my fault that it didn’t get investigated from when the tip was originally received ... to when it actually got investigated?” Nicholson said. “Yeah, I’m at fault for that. I don’t know what else to say besides, you know, I screwed up, I’m sorry and I can only do what I can do.”

Amanda Clay, a former Alpharetta police officer who was raised as Allen’s stepsister, said Wednesday that she had hoped Allen would get more time.

“My family and I have experienced nothing but sorrow, and if Alpharetta failed to promptly investigate crimes involving my brother, that only compounds our sorrow,” Clay said.

Kish, the defense attorney, wrote in a sentencing memo that Allen joined the Marines after graduating from Milton High School, soon after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. While deployed there, he worked as a mortuary affairs specialist, collecting body parts and preparing bodies for burial after battle, according to Kish.

Allen struggled to deal with his experiences in Iraq and was diagnosed in 2018 with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and later with bipolar disorder, the memo says.