SALT LAKE COUNTY, Utah, May 16, 2020 (Gephardt Daily) — The former director of operations for the Salt Lake City International Airport was arrested Wednesday and now faces 25 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, all second-degree felonies.
Randall Darwood Berg, 69, of Draper, is accused of possessing approximately 50,000 child pornography images, according to charging documents filed in the 3rd Judicial District Court in Salt Lake County.
The document states that between January 8 and January 20 of this year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received eight separate Cybertip reports of a user uploading and storing suspected files of child pornography on a Google Photo account.
The username on the account in each report was Randall Berg, and the IP address geo-located to Draper, with further investigation leading to Berg’s home address.
On Wednesday, Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force agents executed a search warrant at Berg’s residence, and Berg consented to be interviewed, the document says.
The reporting ICAC agent states that Berg admitted to intentionally searching for child pornography on the Internet and admitted to viewing images of girls as young as 7 or 8 years old.
According to the charging document, Berg described the images he viewed as “…classy stuff,” and said he had been viewing child porn since at least 2001 or 2002.
ICAC agents searched Berg’s desktop computer and found “approximately twenty thousand additional child pornography images in a recycle bin program, bringing the total number of child pornography files found in Berg’s possession to approximately fifty thousand.”
Berg has been denied bail on the grounds that he “poses a substantial danger to children in the community and is a flight risk,” the charging document says.
Berg has many connections in the aviation industry, and for this reason it is believed that he “can flee the state of Utah with ease.”
Berg is being held at the Salt Lake County Jail on a no-bail probable cause arrest warrant.
Gephardt Daily will follow up on this story as more information is made available.
