Jonathan R. Brown, 34, of the Festus area has been sentenced to seven years in prison for accessing and saving child pornography. He also was ordered to pay $3,000 to an unnamed victim, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.
Brown pleaded guilty in March to a federal charge of receiving child pornography, admitting to accessing child porn as far back as 2015. U.S. District Judge John A. Ross handed down the sentence on Aug. 31 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, the report said.
According to the guilty plea, Brown told FBI agents he had used two sites on the dark web to view child pornography. In March 2016, agents found more than 100 images of child porn on Brown’s desk top computer.
In October 2018 and January 2019, Brown accessed child porn through a peer-to-peer file sharing program. He distributed multiple videos of child sexual abuse to computers operated by the St. Louis and St. Charles County police departments. In January 2019, investigators seized a cell phone at Brown’s Festus-area home that had 150 images and 20 videos of child porn, the agreement said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson prosecuted the case, which was brought forward as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse, according to a written statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Project Safe Childhood uses federal, state and local resources to locate, apprehend and prosecute people who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, go to justice.gov/psc.