A Springfield, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for using a minor to produce child pornography.
Tyler Coons, 26, of Springfield, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool to 15 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Coons to 15 years of supervised release following his incarceration.
On Jan. 30, 2017, Coons pleaded guilty to one count of using a minor to produce child pornography and one count of receiving and distributing child pornography.
The investigation began when the father of an 11-year-old girl filed a report with the Greene County Sheriff’s Department on June 3, 2014, after his daughter received inappropriate Facebook messages from Coons. When he signed into his daughter’s Facebook account, he saw messages from Coons and set up a meeting with him, pretending to be his daughter. The father met Coons on the playground of a local elementary school and told him to have no further contact with his daughter.
On June 20, 2014, a search warrant was obtained for Coons’s Facebook account and Facebook provided investigators with more than 8,000 pages of private messages exchanged between Coons and others. Many of the messages were from young girls between the ages of 11 and 17. Coons asked several of the girls to send him pictures of themselves without clothes on.
During numerous Facebook conversations with girls claiming to be under the age of 18, Coons refers to exchanging naked pictures via social media, including Snapchat, Instagram and Kik. Frequently, during the conversations, Coons refers to the females as “jailbait” and indicates that he is aware he is engaging in illegal activity.
On July 10, 2014, detectives from the Greene County Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant at Coons’s residence. Coons was inside the residence with a 17-year-old female, who was identified as one of the minors who had sent him several pornographic images of herself. Coons admitted that he and the 17-year-old victim were sexually active, and that they could have been sexually active while she was still 16 years old. Coons also admitted that he sent a naked picture of himself to her.
In an interview with investigators, the 17-year-old victim said that she and another minor, whom she believed to be 15 years old, had engaged in sexual activity with Coons at his residence on the night before the search warrant was executed.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney James J. Kelleher. It was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Greene County, Mo., Sheriff’s Department.
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