A former Kansas teacher who used social media to mimic young girls and ask young males for graphic images was sentenced to 30 years in prison after entering a plea agreement for manufacturing child sexual abuse materials.
The 42-year-old Jeffrey Pierce “impersonated a minor female on various social media platforms,” according to a statement from the Justice Department, in order to persuade young men in the neighbourhood, some of whom he taught, to “create and send him images of themselves engaging in sexually explicit conduct.”
According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, as his punishment was announced at a sentencing hearing on Thursday, Pierce dropped his head. He had previously claimed that he was a “changed man” and that he felt “particularly horrible” for the parents of his victims.
According to the publication, Pierce’s plea agreement called for the dismissal of 11 other federal counts in return for his guilty plea to one count of making child pornography.
According to the Capital-Journal, two moms of other adolescent defendants in the case and one of Pierce’s victims all spoke at the court.
According to the Capital-Journal, the unidentified victim added, “It’s hard to cope with.” I made an effort to repress it.
One of the moms told Pierce, “You are a monster,” while the other described him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothes.”
Targeting “minors in his own community, including his own classmates at the high school where he previously taught,” according to the DOJ, Pierce, a former teacher and basketball coach at Seaman High School in Topeka, continued his “exploitative scheme” for many years. According to the Capital-Journal, Pierce taught social studies to ninth graders up until September 2020, when he was sacked after an arrest.
According to the DOJ statement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found over 80 juveniles who were victims of Pierce’s.
According to a statement from the authorities, they discovered tens of thousands of pictures and films of “young boys engaging in sexually explicit behaviour” as well as pictures of children in nakedness that “appear to have been shot in locker rooms at two Topeka high schools.”
The DOJ statement stated that Pierce’s online interactions with these victims “established that he coerced at least one minor to send him additional sexually explicit material by threatening to distribute that minor’s images to others, distributed sexually explicit images of other minors, and encouraged another minor to engage in in-person sexual activity with him while he was still impersonating a minor female.”
According to the Capital-Journal, Pierce confessed as part of a plea deal that between October 2018 and September 2020, she pretended to be a young girl while asking nine male juveniles for obscene images on social media sites including Instagram, Snapchat, and Kik.
Pierce was given the maximum term of 30 years in prison, 5 years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay more than $55,100 in special assessments, according to the DOJ.