Ex-high school photographer from Arkansas pleads guilty to internet stalking

A former high school photographer in the Pine Bluff area pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal Internet-stalking charge, admitting that he pretended online to be teenage girls in order to exchange sexually explicit photographs with several people.

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U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker accepted the guilty plea from Christian Trey Ashcraft, 41, of White Hall, who owns Ashven Photography. In return for his guilty plea to the stalking charge, prosecutors agreed to drop another charge Ashcraft faced of lying to a federal agent by denying on Dec. 30, 2014, that he was the user of an email account through which someone posed as a 15-year-old girl.

Agents had stumbled upon the email account while examining the email account of another man, Seth Ganahl, who had been exchanging emails with the person pretending to be a 15-year-old girl.

In April, Ganahl was sentenced to 20 years in prison on his guilty plea to a charge of production of child pornography.

During the email exchanges, Ganahl repeatedly asked the user of the Yahoo account to send him sexually explicit photographs, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

In a news release Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Chris Thyer and Raymond Parmer Jr., special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New Orleans, said that on Jan. 13, 2015, agents obtained a federal search warrant for Ashcraft's email account, fun_e_gurl_2000@yahoo.com, and found that he had "communicated with multiple individuals while posing as different young teenage girls."

Thyer and Parmer said the agents also discovered that Ashcraft had used the email account to send sexually explicit photographs of an adult woman, while pretending to be her, to several people "over a significant period of time."

The agents tracked down the woman, who is now in her mid-20s, and interviewed her. She told them that when she was 15 years old, she met a man who said his name was Chad Reynolds on a website known as hotomot.com. She told them that for the next three years, she and "Chad Reynolds" engaged in an online relationship without her ever seeing him in person.

The woman explained that after she turned 18, "Chad Reynolds" asked her to take part in a photo shoot at a hotel, according to Thyer and Parmer.

"Upon arrival at the hotel, 'Chad Reynolds' was not there, but Ashcraft, posing as a photographer friend of 'Chad Reynolds,' told [her] that 'Chad' wanted her to start the photo shoot without him there," according to the release. "During the photo shoot the photographer had [the woman] take multiple sexually explicit photographs."

The woman was shown a picture of Ashcraft and identified him as the photographer, they said.

They said that shortly after the photo shoot, the woman ended her online relationship with "Reynolds," and then the sexually explicit photographs that been taken in the hotel room were sent to her acquaintances from someone pretending to be her, using Ashcraft's fun_e_gurl email account.

Thyer and Parmer said Ashcraft later admitted to sending the images while pretending to be the woman. They said a search of Ashcraft's computer revealed about 800 images of the woman, "many of which were sexually explicit."

"As Mr. Ashcraft has learned, you cannot commit crimes and hide behind apparent anonymity on the Internet," Thyer said. "These type of stalking crimes are serious, and can ruin people's lives. We will continue to seek out and punish those who prey on the innocent and vulnerable on the Internet, and continue to ask all parents to closely monitor their children's Internet use."

Ashcraft will be sentenced at a later date, after a pre-sentence report is prepared by U.S. probation officers. Internet stalking is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

The investigation was conducted by the Arkansas State Police and Homeland Security. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristin Bryant.

Metro on 02/23/2017

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