A Pace man faces child pornography charges, stemming from an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that began earlier this month.
Thirty-five-year-old Josh Herrin was arrested Thursday, after agents executed a search warrant at his residence on Tiburon Boulevard. Jeff Duncan at FDLE’s Pensacola office says their cyber-crime team conducted the investigation.
“An individual came up on our radar, as being a suspect in viewing, downloading, and suspected of sharing child pornography,” Duncan said. “We were able to seize multiple computers, which hard drives contain several hundred per computer, videos of children between the ages of 2 and 14.”
Herrin is charged with three counts of promotion of child pornography and 12 counts of possessing child pornography. Both are second degree felonies. He was taken to the Santa Rosa County Jail. As the case progresses, additional charges against Herrin – and other arrests -- are possible.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, around 20% of all pornography contains participants under the age of 18. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone.
Duncan says in the Herrin case as with other child pornography investigations – they’re busy trying to identify the children whose images appear in the videos. At the same time FDLE and their federal law enforcement partners are also looking for the source of the downloads.
“We’ll try to identify what sites they’re hosted out of, and all of it is ultimately one, due to the span of the Internet,” Duncan said. “Our whole focus is to try to identify and locate the child victims that are involved.”
Anyone with additional information on this or any other case are urged to contact the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Pensacola Regional Operations Center at (850) 595-2100
(850) 595-2100.
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