Jacob Chance Greer (U.S. Marslahs Service)
A 28-year-old man will spend decades behind bars after admitting to faking his death and spending years on the lam to avoid child pornography trafficking charges.
A federal judge this week handed down a sentence of 20 years in federal prison to Jacob Chance Greer for intentionally seeking out and collecting child porn. He was also ordered to pay $12,000 restitution to the victims and register as a sex offender.
Greer pleaded guilty in a federal court in Iowa to one count of receiving visual depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
The investigation into Greer began in 2014 as part of Project Hydra, a joint task force of federal, state, and police in Canada targeting people who use the internet to distribute child porn, officials said in a news release.
Greer posted to the internet a graphic video of underage girls being sexually assaulted by a man, court documents state.
“He did not just casually collect child pornography – he intentionally trafficked in it,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “For example, he would go into Omegle.com and share links of child pornography to Dropbox, and, in exchange, he would get links of child pornography in return. He saved child pornography files by attaching them to emails and saving them as a draft.”
Prosecutors said that about a month after Greer was arrested and released on bond, he faked his death, cutting off his GPS ankle bracelet tracker and leaving a suicide note by a body of water in Dallas County, Iowa, 25 west of Des Moines.
But investigators piecing clues together learned that Greer had money, a bow, arrows, and survival gear. He planned to live off the land in remote areas of the upper western states or southern Canada, and hide out in abandoned cabins, authorities said.
Greer was found homeless working odd jobs when he was arrested in April 2022 in Washington state, officials said.
In seeking the maximum sentence for Greer, prosecutors emphasized that his years on the run came at great expense to federal authorities. It took the U.S. Marshals Service nearly a month to track him down.
His escape plan, the sentencing memo states, “triggered a staggering expenditure of time and resources by law enforcement that would not have been incurred but for his unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.”
(image via U.S. Marshals Service)