Case included bathroom recordings in locker room

By Amanda Lubinski 
ALubinski@cherryroad.com 

CLAY COUNTY — After signing a plea agreement that including his pleading guilty to a felony count of invasion of privacy in Clay County Circuit Court, a former North Kansas City Hospital employee now awaits sentencing. 

While his case was originally set to go to trial this month, Gabriel E. Vanriette, 41, of Iola, Kansas, instead agreed to plead guilty to the charge in late February and will avoid trial. According to the agreement, the prosecutor’s office will ask the judge for a three-year prison sentence. The charge stems from incidents that occurred in September of 2023.

According to court documents, North Kansas City police were called to the hospital on Sept. 14 of that year after a charge nurse reported finding what she, at first, thought was a black pen in the emergency department’s staff locker room.

Upon closer inspection, the nurse discovered it was a camera with a microSD card. The camera was pointed toward the toilet. When reviewing the footage on the memory card, officers found two video files. One file showed an empty bathroom with someone’s hand moving the camera. The second included a hand moving the device and the reflection of a man with brownish hair and wearing a bluish green scrub top in the bathroom mirror. About 10 minutes later in the video, it showed a victim using the bathroom. During the investigation, officers obtained surveillance footage of the hallway outside the staff locker room and records of staff keycard swipes made to enter the locker room. 

According to police, Vanriette’s keycard was used 15 times, each for less than a minute, in a 12-hour period to enter the lock room on Sept. 14. When interviewed by police, Vanriette allegedly said he probably used the locker room a few times that day as he was “sick with food poisoning so he was in and out of the bathroom a lot” and that his usage of the locker room depended on where he was in the hospital on a given day.

At the time, Vanriette was employed at the hospital as a respiratory therapist. When asked if he had seen the pen camera device before, he allegedly told investigators “not particularly” and denied purchasing a device like that. 

Court documents also report a computer forensics lab analysis was done of the SD card and found eight files from Sept. 13 and 14 had been deleted. The files allegedly contained recordings of seven other victims and multiple shots of Vanriette’s face and ID badge. Sentencing in the case is scheduled for May 30.