Plea guilty over taping of student
A former Internet technology director at Midland High School in Pleasant Plains admitted Thursday in a Little Rock federal courtroom that he created a false Internet persona last year to lure a student younger than 16 into sharing nude photographs of herself online and having sex with him.
James Verne Seger, 46, who was known at the school as Jess, was sentenced in March to 240 years in the state Department of Correction after he pleaded guilty in Independence County Circuit
Court to Internet stalking, first-degree sexual assault and second-degree sexual assault in connection with the same situation.
His attorney, Clay Simpson of Searcy, said Seger won’t be eligible for parole for 50 years, until he is 96 years old, and only then can he begin serving his federal sentence.
U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, who accepted Seger’s guilty plea on Thursday, just over two weeks before his scheduled jury trial, hasn’t set a sentencing date. However, Seger’s crime is punishable by 15 to 30 years in federal prison, where parole isn’t available, ensuring that he is not likely to ever go free.
Seger had worked at the district for eight years when, one day last fall, several students at the high school came across iPads used by the art department and viewed screen shots of Snapchat messages that had been exchanged between a female student and someone using the name James, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristin Bryant told the judge. Bryant said the messages contained sexually
explicit photographs of a female student who, when questioned by a U.S. Secret Service agent, acknowledged she had been conversing online over the summer with an 18- or 19-year-old she knew only as “James.”
The girl admitted she had sent “James” at least 12 photographs of herself, at least two of which were full nudes, and wanted to end the online conversations but James kept texting her and sending emails. The girl told the agent that she asked Seger to help her delete her Snapchat account and email account, to block “James,” but that she now suspected that Seger might be James.
The agent then interviewed Seger, who said he had helped the girl reset her Snapchat account and had contacted the person named James and told him to leave the girl alone, Bryant said.
But later, after agreeing to take a lie-detector test, Seger admitted he had created the “James” persona to talk to the girl, but denied there had been any sexual contact between them, Bryant said. She said Seger also told the agent he believed the girl was 16.
Bryant said that as the investigation continued, the girl told the agent that “James” had been “blackmailing” her,
telling her to perform sex acts with Seger or he would send her nude photos to her family members.
The girl told the agent that Seger had arrived at her house three times in August 2017, and that they “made out” the first time and had sexual relations the other two times. She also admitted that on Sept. 26, 2017, she met with Seger in his office at the school and touched him sexually while he videotaped her with his cellphone, all at James’ demand.
Bryant said surveillance cameras at the school showed the girl going into Seger’s office one day and not coming out for an hour. Inside the office, she said, agents recovered 70 images of the girl, some of which showed her partially nude or in sexually explicit poses. The video Seger had made with his cellphone was among the images, Bryant noted.
After Bryant read aloud the allegations against Seger that she said she was prepared to prove against him at trial, Seger agreed the synopsis was true.
In exchange for his plea to the production-of-child-pornography charge, a second charge of possessing child pornography was dropped at Bryant’s request.