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Anthony Martinez looks mighty benign in the Facebook photo above.
But investigators with the Colorado Springs Police Department, as well as law enforcers in at least six other states, fear he's anything but.
Martinez, 25, has been arrested on suspicion of what the CSPD describes as "an unlawful, sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old victim." But they say a lot more children could have been lured into his web.
As many as 140 of them.
According to the CSPD, the investigation began in November 2014, when Martinez first became a suspect in sexual assaults involving the aforementioned fourteen-year-old.
It took until this May for department members to obtain an arrest warrant for Martinez, and by the time they managed to do so, he was no longer in Colorado.
With help from Homeland Security Investigations and the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Martinez was taken into custody in Flagstaff, Arizona on May 11.
Since then, detectives in Colorado have continued to work the case, and they believe Martinez has had "illegal, physical contact with underage girls in at least six states," including Colorado.
Moreover, they say that he "may have had varying degrees of contact with more than 140 underage girls, to include at least thirty in the Colorado Springs area between 2011 and 2015."
The cops don't appear to have evidence that Martinez has physically abused all of these children. But they believe that through the use of social media, "he made arrangements to meet [girls] at several locations often frequented by younger members of our community.
"This contact may have included him sending photographs of himself and/or asking the girls for photographs of them or their family members."
An investigator who spoke to Fox21 says Martinez appeared to have interest in a range of underage girls, beginning with ones "in the single digits" and continuing up through the early teens.
With that in mind, the CSPD encourages anyone who knows of Martinez contacting an underage girl in the area to contact the Colorado Springs Police Department Communications Center at 719-444-7000.
Look below to see Martinez's booking photo, followed by a Fox21 report.
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