A former Metro Vancouver youth hockey and baseball coach has been handed a suspended sentence after he was convicted of voyeurism in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.

Randy William Downes has also been placed on six months probation for the conviction, stemming from charges dating back to 2013, when it was alleged he took photographs of young male players, aged 12 and 14, in a locker changing room.

An investigation into Downes began in 2016 when his electronic devices were searched by border officers as he returned to Canada from a trip to Washington state.

While looking for receipts and invoices for duty tax purposes, the officers found suspicious photographs of a young boy taken in multiple different locations in a store, and they flagged Downes to RCMP.

In 2019, a B.C. Supreme Court judge found Downes guilty, saying he surreptitiously took the photographs of the two boys in various states of undress in a place where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Downes coached at various levels for three decades in the Lower Mainland, including with the Burnaby Winter Club, the Coquitlam Minor Hockey Association and Coquitlam-Moody Baseball.

The two boys at the heart of the trial had been playing on teams coached by Downes. Their identities are protected under a publication ban.

Images cropped, emailed, downloaded

The court said in many cases, Downes cropped and emailed the images to himself after snapping them on his phone.

The images were later downloaded to his home computer and saved to a USB stick.

As part of the sentencing, Downes has had to forfeit possession of his electronic devices, which will be scrubbed of the images in question before being returned to him.