Wise County man gets more than 17 years for child porn images

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions.

A Wise County man who was caught with more than 1,000 images of child pornography on his cellphone and computer was sentenced Tuesday to 17  1/2 years in federal prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Jeremy Michael Matthews, 27, pleaded guilty in May to one count of distribution of a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. He was arrested in the case in March.

Starting in 2014, Matthews began receiving and sending the child pornography images through Kik, an instant messaging application, court documents said.

Matthews’ username on the app was “titansfan100390” and he posted the images in a Kik chat room called “#young virgin defloration,” according to the court documents.

In interviews with authorities, he admitted to using Kik to send and receive the images. He also admitted to posting in a Kik chat thread that “little school girls need to be raped,” the court documents said.

Mattthews’ identity was discovered by an Arizona sheriff’s department detective, who was conducting an undercover investigation in the chat room and subpoenaed Kik for Matthews’ account information.

The detective then contacted authorities in Wise County, where Matthews was living, and they found 650 images on his cellphone and 982 images on his computer, the court documents said.

This story was originally published October 24, 2017 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Wise County man gets more than 17 years for child porn images."