Thirty-year-old church deacon Jonathan High of Steinhatchee, Fla., pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography prior to a one-day bench trial during which he was found guilty of creating and storing child pornography.
Details via the Law and Crime website indicate High is facing a minimum mandatory sentence of 15 years and “a combined maximum of 70 years in prison for all three counts.” He’ll be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in January of 2023.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) tipped law enforcement via a “Cybertip” from Verizon about a cloud storage account that contained uploaded files of what appeared to be child pornography.
The account in question was linked to a phone number that had been controlled by High’s late mother.
Verizon and the NCMEC have been teaming up to combat child pornography since 2008.
Under an agreement announced Friday (March 28), NCMEC will periodically provide Verizon with information about Web sites containing child pornography. Verizon will determine whether any of these sites are hosted on a Verizon-owned and operated server used to offer storage or Web hosting services. If so, Verizon will remove or disable access to the content and report the action to NCMEC, as federal law requires.
The defendant’s mother died in November 2021, just months after the August tip. High used his own number and email address when uploading the images in question.
“An investigation revealed the account belonged to High. Law enforcement officers obtained a search warrant for High’s cell phones and desktop computer, and after an examination of their contents, confirmed that High was in possession of multiple child pornography images and videos that depicted prepubescent boys engaged in sex acts or exposing their genitals in a lascivious manner.”
A trial brief says that “hundreds, if not thousands, of images of child pornography” were on the defendant’s accounts. Those images appear to have been materials he downloaded and stored.
However, there was more.
“Further investigation revealed that some of these images and videos were produced by High personally; High produced separate video recordings of two young boys using the bathroom in a Perry, Florida church where High served as a deacon,” the DOJ added.
Court records say High was a deacon at the “Antioch Revival Church” in that municipality.
The court paperwork continues via Law and Crime:
Following High’s arrest, the two children in the videos which were taken on High’s phone were identified as being members of High’s church in Taylor County and were interviewed by FDLE. The children, an 11-year-old boy and a 10-year-old boy were also both identified as the children in the videos by their respective guardians. Both guardians identified the videos as being taken at the Antioch Revival Church. One of the children remembered being in the bathroom and hearing a camera going off but did not know who was taking the picture. The other child remembered being in the bathroom and seeing High stick a phone over the stall that he was in while the child was going to the bathroom.
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