BRIGHAM CITY, Utah, Sept. 28, 2022 (Gephardt Daily) — A Brigham City man is facing four felony charges of sexual exploitation of a minor after police say he posed as his son on the boy’s Instagram account and asked his son’s juvenile friends to provide nude photos.
The boy’s mother alerted police in May of this year.
“She provided me with access to her son’s Instagram account,” says a probable cause statement filed by an officer on the Brigham City Police Department. “I reviewed the messages and later positively identified the recipients as five juvenile females and one juvenile male. The messages to four of the five females and the male were requests for, ‘tits, sexy pictures, or boobs.'”
Also provided to at least one victim was a photo of the suspect’s son in his bedroom, the statement says.
Gephardt Daily is not releasing the suspect’s name, first or last, to protect the privacy of his son.
A warrant tracked the posts to the Brigham City residence. Police learned that at the time the messages were sent, the young account owner was out of state with his mother, and the suspect, 29, “had previously confiscated his son’s phone, and has admitted to accessing his son’s Instagram account at that time.”
The suspect “claimed to not have recollection of the messages being sent, but understood the evidence was that he did,” the probable cause statement says. The suspect told police he was angry and drinking heavily at the time the messages were sent.
None of the four juveniles solicited for photos provided them, the statement says, “so the Sexual Exploitation of Minors was not completed.”
The suspect now faces four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, a third-degree felony, and one count of online impersonation, a class A misdemeanor. He was booked into the Box Elder County jail in August with his bail set at $10,000.
