SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- A member of the Sarcoxie School Board was charged in federal court on Friday with possessing child pornography. John R. Lewis, 67, was charged in a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court.
Lewis was arrested without incident prior to the school board meeting on Thursday night and was in federal custody on Friday, pending a detention hearing.
According to an affidavit filed in support of the complaint, Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers contacted Lewis as part of their investigation into allegations that he had exposed himself to a group of high school students who were working for Lewis on his farm outside Sarcoxie. The troopers obtained a search warrant for Lewis’s residence and seized two desktop computers, a laptop computer and electronic storage devices.
Investigators determined the computers contained 19 multimedia files of child pornography and 113 images of suspected child pornography. The multimedia files and images depicted children as young as 5 years old.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force investigated this case.
