Source: Office of United States Attorneys
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – A Carthage, Mo., man pleaded guilty in federal court today to charges related to the sexual exploitation of a child.
Uriah Behl, 40, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool, to one count of sexual exploitation of children. By pleading guilty today, Behl admitted to secretly recording a naked juvenile in the shower.
The investigation began when the Jasper County, Missouri, Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) received a call reporting that a camera had been found in a community shower room in Carthage, Mo. Witnesses found a cell phone in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, recording through a crack in the open cabinet door. Several videos were found on the phone, containing multiple victims, including a juvenile.
In a post-Miranda interview, Behl admitted to JCSO officers that he had set the phone up to record the whole room, including the shower, when motion was detected. Behl claimed that he did not intend to record the juvenile victim; however, clips from the videos focused on portions of the video depicting the juvenile victim naked, with their genitals exposed.
Behl gave JCSO officers consent to search the phone he was using to record and the cell phone he used for calls and texting. A forensic search of the phones found over an hour of videos from the shower room, several clips from those videos containing the naked juvenile victim, multiple searches for child pornography, as well as 161 images depicting child pornography downloaded from the internet.
Under federal statutes, Behl is subject to a sentence of at least 15 and up to 30 years in federal prison without parole. The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes, as the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court based on the advisory sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled after the completion of a presentence investigation by the United States Probation Office.
Behl will be required to register as a sex offender upon his release from prison and will be subject to federal and state sex offender registration requirements, which may apply throughout his life.
This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie L. Wan. It was investigated by the Jasper County, Mo., Sheriff’s Office, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force.
Project Safe Childhood
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc . For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab “resources.”