Jonathan High. (Image via a Taylor County, Florida jail booking photo.)
A 31-year-old church deacon in Florida will spend more than two decades behind bars for secretly filming young boys using the bathroom inside the church where he served and possessing “hundreds, if not thousands” of child pornography images and videos, prosecutors said.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor sentenced Jonathan High, a former deacon of The Antioch Revival Church in Perry, Fla., to 22 years in federal prison. Perry is about 60 miles southeast of Tallahassee.
Following a trial, High was found guilty in October of two counts of producing child pornography. He had pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography.
“Child predators seek to prey upon our children in any setting imaginable – in this instance, from inside a house of worship,” Jason R. Coody, Unites States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida, said in a statement. “As such, we must remain vigilant.”
Following his incarceration, High will be required to spend the rest of his life on supervised release and register as a sex offender. The court also ordered him to provide restitution to the victims in the form of counseling and to forfeit two cell phones and a computer.
The investigation investigation into High began when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children presented authorities with a from Verizon about a cloud storage account that contained uploaded files of what appeared to be child pornography.
Law enforcement officers then obtained and executed a search warrant for High’s two cell phones and desktop computer. Those devices were found to have contained multiple child pornography images and videos depicting “prepubescent boys engaged in sex acts or exposing their genitals in a lascivious manner,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
Authorities said High recorded videos of two young boys using the bathroom in church, officials said. The videos and images of the boys, ages 10 and 11, were on one of High’s cell phones, prosecutors said.
“One of the children remembered being in the bathroom and hearing a camera going off but did not know who was taking the picture,” prosecutors wrote in court documents. “The other child remembered being in the bathroom and seeing High stick a phone over the stall that he was in while the child was going to the bathroom.”