A Saukville man who became a felon at age 19 when he pleaded guilty in 2020 to running a drug house managed to avoid prison then.

But Evan M. Brecke, now 21, who was arrested earlier this year after authorities found a video on his phone that they believe shows him having sex with a 14-year-old girl, won’t be able to avoid a state penitentiary if prosecutors have their way.

Brecke pleaded guilty last week in Ozaukee County Circuit Court to sexual assault of a child younger than 16 and possession of child pornography, both felonies.

During a July 7 court hearing, Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Lindsay recommended Brecke be sentenced to three years in prison followed by three years of extended supervision for the child pornography conviction.

Lindsay said he will ask Judge Steve Cain to withhold a prison sentence on the sexual assault charge and place Brecke on probation for 10 years.

Cain is scheduled to sentence Brecke on Aug. 17.

The case dates to last year when the father of a 14-year-old girl who was friends with Brecke’s sister contacted the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office to report that he believed his daughter was in a sexual relationship with Brecke and that she had stayed with him at his grandparents’ house in Saukville, where he lives, while they were out of town.

When confronted by authorities in September, the girl said she was dating a boy her own age that she goes to school with. When asked about previous boyfriends, she said, “Oh, you’re here because of Evan,” but said they were just friends and had never had an intimate relationship, according to the criminal complaint.

Brecke told a detective that he and the girl had been close for the last four months but said they were only friends, even after being confronted with a photo of the two of them with their faces together with a text caption that read, “You’re the one,” the complaint states.

Detectives reminded Brecke that it’s illegal for adults to have sex with minors. He said he was already aware of that.

On Dec. 3, the girl’s mother told detectives that while looking at her daughter’s old phone she found a text message exchange between her daughter and Brecke that suggested the two of them were having sex, according to the complaint.

A month later, after detectives had been looking for Brecke, he walked into the Sheriff’s Office and, after being confronted with the text messages, admitted that contrary to what he told them earlier, he and the girl were in a relationship, that they talk sexually to each other all the time and they had sex once in September at his grandparents’ house, the complaint states.

Brecke gave authorities access to his phone and on it they found text messages Brecke sent to the girl that day saying he was at the Sheriff’s Office, he was in trouble and she should delete everything from her Snapchat account.

While inspecting the contents of Brecke’s phone, a detective noticed the photo gallery was empty. He checked the phone’s recently deleted folder and found 586 images and videos, most of which were of Brecke and the girl and some of which suggested a sexual relationship between the two of them.

One of the videos showed two people having sex, although it was taken close up and the people in it were not immediately identifiable. Authorities, however, said the male and female in the video had the same body sizes as Brecke and the girl and that a birthmark on the back of the female in the video matched the girl’s birthmark, the complaint states.

At the time, Brecke was on probation in connection with a 2019 drug case that dates to September of that year when authorities investigating reports of THC vaping cartridges being sold from a home on Tower Lane in Saukville discovered 14 people, several of them teenagers, in a smoke-filled apartment described by one of them as a “party house” rife with marijuana.

The smell of marijuana coming from the apartment, where Brecke and Anthony M. Gregory lived, was so strong that officers detected it before entering, and when they asked one of the people there if there were drugs in the home, he said “there was weed, and it was everywhere,” according to the criminal complaint filed in that case.

Gregory told officers that he bought vape cartridges containing THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in Milwaukee and resold them for $30 each, the complaint states. He said he had about $200 in his room from the sale of the cartridges.

Brecke, who said he was not involved in the sale of the cartridges,  told investigators that he rented the apartment and allowed Gregory to move in with him. Brecke said Gregory had been selling THC vape cartridges for two to three months and sold about one or two of them a day.

Gregory told officers that just before they arrived at the apartment, which he called a “party house,” most of the people there were smoking a blunt, or marijuana cigar, the complaint states.

Of the people in the apartment, two were 16-year-olds.

Brecke and Gregory pleaded guilty to felony charges of maintaining a drug trafficking place as well as possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, both misdemeanors.

Cain withheld prison sentences, placed them on probation and ordered them to serve time in the county jail as conditions of probation.

The judge also granted requests from both men to have their criminal records expunged if they completed their periods of probation, an opportunity Brecke squandered with his latest conviction.

Because Cain withheld a prison sentence for Brecke, who then violated his probation, he now faces a prison sentence in the drug case as well.

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