A 51-year-old man once convicted of molesting an 11-year-old girl at Sandy's Festival of Trees is now facing 10 new felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, filed months after his parole from that earlier case was scheduled to expire in May 2026. Christopher Joseph Rebstock was charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court after parole officers, acting on a tip from a national child-safety watchdog, seized his phone and found thousands of illicit files, according to charging documents.
A Tip That Came Just in Time
According to KSL, the case began in March when the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received a cyber tip about an account uploading several dozen files depicting minors in sexually explicit conduct. The tip was passed to Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children task force, which traced the account to Rebstock, per charging documents cited by the outlet.
Rebstock was on parole at the time for a 2013 conviction of attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony for which he was sentenced to a minimum of three years up to life in Utah state prison. That parole was scheduled to terminate in May 2026, but ICAC task force members had his parole officer seize his phone before that could happen. Agents extracted the device's contents pursuant to a warrant and located 2,400 files of child sexual abuse material among his personal files, the station's report states.
Ten Felony Counts With an Enhancement
Rebstock now faces 10 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, each a second-degree felony. Each count also includes a habitual sex offender sentencing enhancement if he is convicted. The 2025 sentencing guidelines were authored by the Utah Sentencing Commission. His parole violation hearing on the earlier case is scheduled for November.
The Festival of Trees Incident
The Festival of Trees is held at Sandy's Mountain America Expo Center, according to Visit Salt Lake. At the venue then known as South Towne Expo Center at 9575 S. State in Sandy, Rebstock inappropriately touched an 11-year-old girl who had just stepped off stage after performing. Other patrons witnessed him grab the girl's backside and chased him down, holding him until officers arrived, per KSL's reporting on the charges.
Rebstock was already a registered sex offender at the time of that 2012 arrest. He was ultimately convicted in connection with the Festival of Trees incident roughly a decade before his newest charges were filed this week.
A Criminal History Dating to a 1982 Killing
Rebstock's record extends back further than his Utah offenses. At 16, he killed his 12-year-old neighbor, Lara Deutsch, in New Orleans in 1982; the Louisiana State Supreme Court later ruled that his confession had not been legally obtained, a decision that led to his early release after he served more than a decade in prison for manslaughter, KSL reported. The Salt Lake Tribune also reported that the confession dispute centered on Rebstock's father refusing to sign a Miranda waiver form, a challenge the Louisiana Supreme Court reviewed in a 1982 opinion; Louisiana Department of Corrections records confirmed he served just over 10 years before his release in April 1993.
Rebstock later pleaded guilty in 2001 to an amended charge of attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child, with a sodomy of a child charge dropped in exchange for that plea. The Salt Lake Tribune reported the 2001 conviction stemmed from a September 2000 incident involving a 4-year-old boy in Salt Lake City, for which Rebstock was sentenced to three years to life in prison and paroled in March 2009. The Tribune also reported that Rebstock had faced earlier Utah charges in the 1990s that were resolved through a plea in abeyance and dismissed in 1998, before that 2000 offense occurred. He was granted parole for the 2013 Festival of Trees conviction in 2021, and that parole was supposed to have terminated earlier this year before the ICAC investigation intervened.
What Comes Next
Rebstock's parole violation hearing tied to the 2013 case is set for November, while his newly filed sexual exploitation charges move forward separately in 3rd District Court.
