Alaska man gets 15 years in child sex exploitation case in Live Oak
A 38-year-old Alaska man was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison last week for producing child sexual exploitation material while in Texas, the Department of Justice said.
Thomas Owen Norvell was arrested in his Fairbanks, Alaska, home in November 2021 and pleaded guilty to the charge in October 2022. In addition to his sentence, Norvell must serve 15 years of probation after he is released.
The investigation into Norvell was conducted by Live Oak Police and the FBI’S San Antonio division. Officials said the victims’ grandmother called Live Oak police in December
2020 to say that her 8and 11-year-old granddaughters had spoken about sexual abuse by Norvell, who was their mother’s live-in boyfriend.
The 11-year-old was found by her grandmother taking naked photographs of herself on a tablet, and the girl said that Norvell made her take the photos and share them with people on the social media app “Kik,” a federal complaint said.
The girl told police that Norvell had been molesting her since she was 8 years old when he lived with the family near Austin. The molestation continued after the family moved to Montana and California and stopped when the girls moved to
Texas to live with their grandmother.
According to the federal complaint, Norvell showed pornographic videos to the children, committed sexual acts with them, made them perform sexual acts on each other, and forced them to take photos of themselves to send to people on social media. Norvell told the girls that he would harm them or others if they disclosed his actions.
When investigators searched Norvell’s Google accounts, they found emails from his account to another with more than 30 images containing child sexual abuse material, the complaint said. While some of the photos were of the victim, other photos had the child’s head superimposed onto the bodies of women in sexual situations.
Officials with the investigation said Norvell’s sentencing sends an aggressive message to people who exploit children.
“It took a lot of courage for the victim in this case to speak up and for their relative to report the abuse that had taken place,” said U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza of the Western District of Texas. “I commend our law enforcement partners here in Texas and in Alaska for investigating and arresting this predator, leading to this lengthy sentence.”