An undercover investigation by the Tellico Plains Police Department has led to the conviction of a Sweetwater teenager described as the "number one distributor of child porn in Monroe County."
Tellico Plains Detective Rodney Cathey, who heads up the 10th Judicial Districts Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) division, said he first discovered the teenager in March.

"I was doing an online undercover investigation when I discovered what he was offering," Cathey said. "He was using a file sharing system and had hundreds of child porn pictures and one video that showed what appeared to be a five-year-old girl being raped."

Despite the amount of material the 16-year-old had, law enforcement doesn't believe he was producing the child porn.

"He was a distributor, not a producer," Cathey said. "Most of the pictures have children that have been listed as missing and being in danger. None were local, though he did have a picture of a nude 14-year-old Tellico Plains girl who sent him the picture on his cell phone."

The 16-year-old boy pleaded guilty in Monroe County Juvenile Court where Cathey said he received probation until he turns 19, must serve 50 hours of community service and cannot use a computer or access the Internet for entertainment purposes of any kind.

"About the only way he can use a computer," Cathey said, "is for education purposes at school, and only if it has a monitoring or blocking program on it."
Cathey said there are other suspected child porn providers in Monroe County and surrounding counties and several investigations are ongoing.

Tellico Plains Police Chief Bill Isbell said the world has changed and predators are coming right into people's homes.
"We used to warn people about strangers," Isbell said. "Now, through the Internet, they can come right into the house and the parents aren't even aware it's happening. The predators come into the home and entice children to come meet them.

"And I truly believe unmonitored Internet access is why this happened," Isbell added. "The computer was in his bedroom and his parents, who aren't computer literate, didn't know what he was doing. He was free to do whatever he wanted and ended up like this."

Isbell said a recent trend called "sexting" is also becoming a concern. "That was a part of this," he said. "Young girls are taking explicit pictures of themselves and sending them to their boyfriends, or other boys on their cell phones, and they end up on the Internet where anybody can see them. And these girls don't seem to realize that those pictures will always be there. Their kids or even grandkids could see them."

The ICAC program, through the Tellico Plains Police Department, offers free Internet software that helps parents monitor what they children are doing. It is called "Internet Cop" and is available for free. The department will also put on programs concerning Internet crimes and how they affect children.

"I hope this has put a stop to such actions for this young man," Isbell said. "There's no evidence he'd tried to act out anything he saw, but you don't know what might have happened had he become an adult without being caught."

michael.thomason@advocateanddemocrat.com | 442-4575