Crystal Lake man accused of filming troubled stepdaughter: ‘Caring dad’ or ‘predator?’

Was secretly filming his stepdaughter the “stupid” act of a “caring dad,” or is is Christopher Hopp, as McHenry County prosecutors assert, a “perverted stepfather?”

On the second day of Hopp’s sentencing hearing, his defense attorney and prosecutors gave different explanations for why the Crystal Lake man placed a pen camera in the vanity-changing area of a bathroom where his stepdaughter, then 16, showered.

In June, Hopp pleaded guilty to unlawfully possessing 50 to 200 grams of psilocybin, a Class 1 felony, and unauthorized video recording, a Class 4 felony.

Though much of the attorneys’ arguments for his sentencing centered around why Hopp secretly filmed the girl, that charge carries a lower sentencing range of probation to three years in prison. The Class 1 felony drug conviction carries the longer sentencing, up to 14 years in prison. Prosecutors are asking for a long prison sentence; his attorneys are seeking probation.

Hopp testified Friday that the girl’s behavior and mental health was “escalating” and that he and the girl’s mother had been trying to get her help. They’d worked with the school dean and counselors, and the girl had been in multiple mental health facilities. She was lying, sneaking people into the house, harming herself and tattooing and piercing herself, Hopp said.

Ten days before the girl found the pen camera filming her after a shower, she had ingested 28 pills in a suicide attempt, both Hopp and the girl’s mother, Corinne Breskovich, testified. The judge also watched a video of the teen telling this to a forensic interviewer at the McHenry County Children’s Advocacy Center. The interview took place the day after the girl found the camera and police were involved.

The girl also told the interviewer Hopp and her mother often berated and demeaned her, which they both denied from the stand. After finding the pen camera on Jan. 25, 2023, she told the interviewer, she felt “unsafe” in her home and worried there were more cameras and recordings of her in her bedroom.

After the couple was arrested, the girl went to live with her biological father. She died last year of an accidental drug overdose, according to authorities, Hopp and her mother.

Hopp described his relationship with the teen as “a good father-daughter relationship” and said he loved her and was trying to protect her.

After his arrest, Hopp said he received death threats and lost custody of his 6-year-old child, his job and a new business the couple had recently bought.

At one point, Judge Mark Gerhardt stopped the attorney’s questions to ask Hopp if he is guilty of the charges he pleaded to. Hopp repeatedly responded, “I accept that plea.” Gerhardt, seemingly frustrated with Hopp’s answer, asked the question again: “Are you guilty?” After a long pause Hopp said, “Yes, I am.”

Prosecutors earlier dismissed two counts of the most serious charges of possession and producing images of child sexual abuse, Class X felonies that can result in 30 years in prison. Hopp said detectives retrieved nine electronic devices from his home, including his cellphone, and found no additional images of child sexual abuse.

If sent to prison, Hopp said, he would lose military benefits, which would cause great hardship to Breskovich, and he would not be able to continue helping his sister and father, who both have cancer. He turned to the judge and thanked him for allowing him to speak on his own behalf. He asked the judge to “understand what our family has been through.”

“I want Your Honor to know this is a terrible situation and I have true remorse,” Hopp told the judge. The filming “was not for perverse reasons. ... It was to help my daughter.”

On the first day of Hopp’s sentencing, Breskovich said she knew about the pen camera. She said their home was in chaos, and the pen cam was their “last-ditch effort” to prevent her daughter from hurting or killing herself. Breskovich faced the same drug charges as Hopp, as well as gun charges for allegedly possessing firearms and ammunition without a valid Firearms Owners Identification card.

Breskovich also said she was growing the psilocybin after learning it could help with her own mental health. When her husband found out, she said, he told her to get rid of it. Breskovich has since pleaded guilty to possessing the psychedelic mushrooms with the intent to deliver and was sentenced to probation.

Despite what she said in court, authorities described the couple’s basement as a “mushroom grow operation” with 236 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, mushroom spores, a scale, $2,000 in cash, packaging materials and labels.

Assistant State’s Attorney Maria Marek also rebuked Hopp’s claims of making the videos in trying to protect the teen; and that there is no indication he shared the videos which were found in the couple’s master bedroom closet, Marek said, just means he wanted to save them for himself.

Marek also said this is not the first time Hopp has been accused of “surreptitiously” recording a vulnerable female. While he was enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard, Marek said a woman accused him of secretly filming a sexual encounter with her of which she had no memory. Hopp was charged with rape and court marshaled, the prosecutor said, but he was found not guilty. In court Friday, he said he and the woman had consensually videotaped their encounters.

Marek asserted Breskovich’s testimony was not credible and said she did not “show a shred of emotion” when on the stand talking about her deceased daughter.

She called Hopp “a very well-rehearsed puppet,” “a liar” and a “predator.”

Marek said the defense and Hopp’s supporters say he’s “a nice guy” and the teen “was a really bad kid,” and now “the defendant is doing exactly what she said they would” and blaming it all on her.

“It’s easy for them to sit on the stand and say these things about her knowing she cannot come in and” defend herself, Marek said.

Hopp’s attorney, Anthony Villalobos, said setting up the hidden pen camera to record the girl “was stupid.”

“He is a stupid, but caring dad. It is easy to look back today and say that now,” but no one knows the stress the family was under, the attorney said.

Of the girl’s death, Villalobos said that sending Hopp to prison “won’t bring her back. It will only hurt the family more.”

Gerhardt is due to announce Hopp’s sentence Aug. 19.