South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Ex-employee at Disney’s Reedy Creek faces child porn charge
A former facilities maintenance supervisor with Walt Disney World’s Reedy Creek government agency has been charged with distributing child pornography after the FBI said he used an app to send explicit content, according to court records.
The criminal complaint against Franqui Soto was filed Jan. 7 in Orlando federal court.
Soto’s final day at his $59,917-ayear job at the Reedy Creek Improvement District was Jan. 13, said district spokeswoman Eryka Washington.
Washington declined to say whether Soto, who worked there since 2013, had been fired or resigned.
Soto caught the attention of the FBI when an undercover employee noticed someone sending videos and images and making inappropriate comments in a group called Boys For Play on the Kik app, the criminal complaint said.
The user name knightwatch10 sent content in November 2020 that showed naked teenagers and children as young as about 10 years old. Some of the material depicted minors masturbating or performing sex acts on adults, authorities said.
With subpoenas for Kik and Charter Communications, the FBI said it found the email address tied to knightwatch’s app account that had been set up with an iPhone and then found the IP address that belonged to the Orlando house where Soto lived at.
Authorities could see Soto’s Facebook
photos — like one at his home’s pool — that matched with pictures from knightwatch’s account.
On Jan. 7, FBI Special Agents Kevin Kaufman and Rodney Hyre confronted Soto at his home, the complaint said.
Soto said he subscribed to Kik under the user name knightwatch10 but at first denied receiving or sending child pornography on the app, which he said downloaded to talk to a friend in England, the criminal complaint said.
When the agents showed him the photos, Soto then admitted he had received and sent the photos.
“I asked Soto about the comments he made when distributing the images and the videos,” Kaufman wrote. “Soto replied he was just trying to excite the men he was chatting with.”
Soto was assigned a public defender to represent him but later retained counsel from Gainesville attorney Gilbert Schaffnit, who said Thursday he had not met with his client yet so he could not comment.
The Reedy Creek Improvement District is the government that oversees the roads, fire protection, utilities and other infrastructure on Disney World’s massive property in Central Florida. Reedy Creek also has other landowners, such as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, too, but their footprint is small in comparison with the Mouse’s thousands of acres.
At the Walt Disney Company’s request, the state created the special taxing district in 1967 to give it more control in designing and building its future theme park empire in Florida.