SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, March 24, 2021 (Gephardt Daily) — A Salt Lake City man was arrested Wednesday morning on 10 second-degree felony sexual exploitation charges.
A probable cause statement from the 3rd District Court of Salt Lake County said Arik James Jeppsen, 20, was subsequently ordered to be released with conditions.
On March 12, a detective with Unified Police Department told a detective with Murray Police Department that he needed assistance with a sex offense case that he investigated in 2020. The UPD detective told the Murray detective Jeppsen was arrested last year on suspicion of rape of a child, sodomy of a child, entice a minor by Internet, sexual exploitation of a minor, aggravated kidnapping, and sexual abuse of a child, the statement said.
Jeppsen was convicted last year on two counts of sexual abuse of a child, a second-degree felony, in February, and sentenced to four years of probation.
“Part of his investigation included collecting multiple items of evidence from Arik’s home which included multiple laptops,” the statement said. “These laptops were examined by Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.”
The laboratory subsequently told the UPD detective that child pornography was “possibly” on the laptops. The UPD detective then handed over the case and evidence to the Murray detective as the suspect is now living in that city.
The Murray detective then took the laptops to the Utah Attorney General’s Office and viewed the alleged evidence with an agent.
The images that were on the disc allegedly depicted “hundreds of prepubescent girls who were approximately 10-12 years old,” engaged in sexual acts, as well as other photographs that allegedly showed females of that same age group nude.
The suspect allegedly told the UPD detective “that he used to have a problem with that (child pornography), but not anymore,” the statement said.
