BUCKHANNON, W.Va. — A West Virginia man is accused of possessing more than 27,000 images of child pornography on hard drives, tablets, DVDs, a desktop computer and an Xbox, authorities said.
Roy Wayne Lemon, 41, of Buckhannon, was arrested Tuesday, WDTV reported. According to a criminal complaint filed on March 19, Lemon was charged with distributing/possession of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, greater than 600 images, WBOY-TV reported.
Authorities received an initial tip on Aug. 21, 2022, from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about an explicit image of a young child uploaded to Bing’s image search on June 12, 2022, according to the television station.
Buckhannon man charged after DVDs labeled 'CP' found during search https://t.co/Fj5vqk0JOb pic.twitter.com/PaV6jqtHXG
— WBOY 12News (@WBOY12News) April 10, 2024
According to the criminal complaint, Senior Trooper C.D. Harper of the West Virginia State Police, who received the first tip, said that a second tip was submitted by Bing/Microsoft to the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office about similar images uploaded to the same IP address, The Inter-Mountain newspaper of Elkins reported.
After obtaining a subpoena for the IP address, police were provided subscriber information by Frontier Communications, WDTV reported.
On July 5, 2023, police received a cyber-tip that alleged that someone using the same IP address had uploaded child pornography images to the same image search tool.
Eight days later, state troopers went to a home in Buckhannon and spoke with several residents, including Lemon, who lived at the home with his mother, WBOY reported.
Lemons admitted to “having just recently viewed child pornography on the internet,” according to the criminal complaint. The officers then received permission to search the home and began with Lemons’ bedroom, the television station reported.
Police discovered 184 DVD/CD discs, which they said had handwritten titles that indicated they contained child pornography, WDTV reported.
Police also seized multiple items, including:
- A USB drive;
- Two hard drives;
- One spiral-bound notebook containing handwritten notes of website URLs related to child pornography;
- One RCA tablet;
- One Pavilion desktop computer;
- One Xbox One gaming console;
- One 16 GB SD card.
Harper reviewed the contents of five of the 184 discs, and determined that they contained 1,840 total minutes of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, the Inter-Mountain reported. According to the West Virginia State Code on the filming of sexually explicit conduct of minors, each video clip or similar recording of five minutes or less constitutes 75 images. Video clips or similar recordings of more than five minutes “constitute 75 images for every two minutes in length it exceeds five minutes.”
Using those guidelines, Harper said there were 27,600 images discovered on the DVDs, WDTV reported.
Lemon was arrested. He is being held at the Tygart Valley Regional Jail on a $100,000 cash-only bond, according to the Inter-Mountain.
© 2024 Cox Media Group
