Jamal W. Kimball, 31, who lives in the Jefferson County portion of Fenton, has admitted to sending obscene messages over a six-month period to an FBI agent who he thought was a 13-year-old girl. FBI agents also discovered Kimball had received pornographic pictures from an Ohio teenage girl through Snapchat, the U.S. District Attorney’s Office reported.
On Tuesday, May 20, Kimball pleaded guilty to one count of transferring obscene material to a minor in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 20, according to court records.
Kimball began communicating with a Kansas City-based FBI agent, who was posing as a teenager, through Kik Messenger in December 2022. Kimball sent explicit messages and pictures to the agent through May 2023, the case’s guilty plea said.
In July 2023, the Kansas City FBI field office contacted the St. Louis FBI field office about the messages. FBI agents in November 2023 executed a search warrant at Kimball’s home, and they found images sent from a 15-year-old Ohio girl that Kimball had requested through Snapchat, according to the guilty plea.
Assistant U.S. attorney Jillian Anderson prosecuted the case.
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Department of Justice Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, visit justice.gov/psc.