Arlington youth group leader shared nude images of prepubescent boys, authorities say
A 24-year-old Arlington man for about two years used a chat app to share photographs of nude children, federal prosecutors alleged on Wednesday.
Andy Haas is a computer programmer and led a middle school boys’ youth group at a church, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. He was charged in U.S. District Court with transporting a depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct via interstate commerce.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to release the name of the church because it had not been discussed in court.
Haas used Kik, a messaging application, to share explicit images of prepubescent boys using the accounts “gunner1714” and “gunnersmit,” the prosecutors alleged.
Kik flagged the images as having hash values associated with known child pornography and reported them to law enforcement. A Homeland Security Investigations special agent subpoenaed the subscriber information for the IP address associated with the upload and traced it to Haas, prosecutors alleged.
Haas admitted under questioning that he used Kik to share about 100 pornographic images of children, some as young as 8- or 9-years-old, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He said he obtained the images from Kik group chats during the past two years.
Haas faces up to 20 years in prison if he is convicted.
On April 8, in the Northern District of Texas, a man was accused of the same crime using the same app. Stephen Corkill, 35, was a seventh-grade teacher at Marine Creek Middle School at the time he is accused of sending a photograph of a nude child.
