Tricking girls online nets term of 2 years
PB photographer rebuked by judge
In imposing a two-year prison term for stalking girls on the Internet from 2005 through 2014, a federal judge on Tuesday called photographer Christian Trey Ashcraft of Pine Bluff “despicable.”
Ashcraft, 42, who was also known online as Chad Reynolds, pleaded guilty in February to the Internet stalking charge in exchange for a second charge of lying to a federal agent being dismissed. Ashcraft owned Ashven Photography and was formerly a high school photographer in the Pine Bluff area.
Ashcraft admitted during his plea hearing that he had pretended online to be a teenage girl in order to exchange sexually explicit photographs of girls and women.
When sentencing him Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker said that only one word — “despicable” — could describe his years of stalking. In addition to the two-year prison term, she ordered Ashcraft to serve three years on probation after his release and pay a $1,000 fine.
The two-year sentence was at the top end of the penalty range recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.
“Ashcraft’s sentence shows that people who commit cowardly acts behind a computer screen will be identified and prosecuted,” acting U.S. Attorney Pat Harris said later in a prepared statement. Harris said Ashcraft is now being “held accountable for using the Internet to torment a young, innocent victim.”
Ashcraft admitted sending sexually explicit photographs of an adult female, while pretending to be her, to several people over a long period of time.
When Homeland Security investigators discovered the woman’s identity and interviewed her, she was in her mid-20s. She told them that when she was 15, she had met a man using the name Reynolds on a website and that she had a strictly online relationship with him for three years, never meeting him in person.
The woman said that after she turned 18, “Reynolds” asked her to take part in a photo shoot at a hotel. When she arrived at the hotel, she encountered Ashcraft, who told her that Reynolds wasn’t there but that he was Reynolds’ photographer friend. He also told her that “Chad” wanted her to start the session without him, Harris said.
During the photo shoot, Ashcraft took several sexually explicit photographs, which he then sent to the woman’s acquaintances, pretending to be her, after she ended her online relationship with his alter ego, “Reynolds.” Harris said that after obtaining a search warrant for the email account used to send the images, federal agents found about 800 images of the woman, many of them sexually explicit, on Ashcraft’s computer.
During the investigation, agents learned that Ashcraft had “communicated with multiple individuals while posing as different young teenage girls,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.