Former WCU student pleads guilty in child porn case

PHILADELPHIA >> A former West Chester University student who was caught with thousands of images of child pornography on a computer and iPhone had pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges, according to authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella on Tuesday confirmed Ryan Andrew Davis had entered guilty pleas to two counts in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia before U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who will preside over sentencing in November.

Davis, 22, who lived in Caln, Chester County, and Thornbury, Delaware County, pleaded guilty to single counts of transportation of child pornography and possession of child pornography. The charges together carry with them a mandatory prison term of five years and a possible maximum term of 40 years in prison.

Davis was arrested in 2018 while he was attending WCU and living in Delaware County. A plea agreement entered in court Tuesday stated Davis had a collection of more than 22,700 images of videos of child pornography, many involving young boys, he had accumulated over the period from June 2015 to August 2017. Some of those incidents took place while Davis, known by the screen name “davis_rad,” was on West Chester’s campus.

“Many of the children depicted in the videos and images in (Davis’s) collection were identified as victims of sexual assault, and their images traded around the world,” Rotella wrote in the plea agreement.

The pornography was found on Davis’ Apple MacBook Pro laptop and an iPhone 7, both of which he was ordered to surrender to authorities.

The case was brought by the federal authorities as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse that was launched in May 2006 by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a press release at the time of his arrest. Project Safe Childhood joins federal, state and local law enforcement resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute those who exploit children via the Internet as well as to identify and rescue the child involved.

According to Rotella’s memo, authorities were alerted to mages of possible child pornography being uploaded to a DropBox account under the name of “Andrew Davidson” in October 2016. A check of the IP address associated with the account were traced to Davis’s home in Concord, Delaware County.

A search warrant was executed for the home in August 2017, at which time Dais was confronted with the accusations of possession of child pornography. He admitted to uploading the images, but said that he had delete the links after an arrest of separate charges when he was a juvenile.

Investigators, however, determined Davis had continued to access and download child porn for more than three years after his arrest in 2014.

The case was investigated by the FBI and the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office.

Davis is represented by defense attorney Thomas Schindler of Kennett Square.