A 23-year-old from Silver Spring was sentenced Monday to federal prison on child pornography charges after he solicited sexual videos from boys through text messages and online chat services.
Federal agents and Montgomery County police had found hundreds of images and videos with child pornography in Demetrius Murray’s Silver Spring home in early 2016, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge George J. Hazel sentenced Murray to 21 years in federal prison for producing child pornography, followed by a lifetime of supervised release as part of a plea agreement, the office announced Tuesday.
Murray was reported to authorities before January 2016 after a woman in Utah learned of his communication with her son and alerted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Murray had contacted the 11-year-old boy through Xbox Live and then through KIK, an online messaging app. According to court documents, Murray also used the video chat service Skype to talk to the boy and share a video of himself masturbating. He then asked the boy for a video of him performing a sexual act, which the boy sent, and Murray allegedly converted the video into still images.
After the boy’s mother contacted the center, authorities searched Murray’s home on a warrant in January 2016, finding more than 600 images and 400 videos depicting minors, most of them considered child pornography, according to prosecutors.
A search of his iPhone also revealed that Murray had texted a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 2015. The boy told him his age, and Murray asked him to send photos of his body and of himself performing sex acts with another child relative, according to attorneys. The boy sent him images depicting child pornography.
As part of the plea deal, Murray was ordered to forfeit his iPhone, iPod and laptop, which he used to produce and store the child pornography, according to court documents. He is also required to register as a sex offender.
