James Michael McGill, a 33-year-old resident of 16 Kaywood Place in Palm Coast, was arrested Thursday on 10 counts of possession of child sexual abuse material and booked at the Flagler County jail on $150,000 bond.
The arrest follows an investigation that began in late September when Flagler County Sheriff’s detective Sierra Held received a CyberTip reported by MediaLab, which owns the messaging app Kik, which had flagged an upload of 15 files containing suspected child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.
The material consisted of video clips of up to two minutes each involving adults abusing pre-pubescent children as young as 5. Abusers and people who trade on the material commonly use messaging apps as an exchange mechanism. The detective obtained a search warrant for the email associated with the messaging app (its handle was “loli”), which produced a series of CASM images.
MediaLab had also provided the IP of origin, which the detective connected to a Spectrum account and, through a subpoena, returned the subscriber’s information: McGill, and his address in Palm Coast. Sheriff’s detectives and deputies served a search warrant at the address on Jan. 11. McGill was there with two other occupants of the house.
A selfie of McGill had been located among the files uploaded to Kik. He acknowledged the selfie being of him but denied having used Kik in recent years, or that suggestive pictures of him were recent, though he aid he most likely sent images of his penis within the last six months. When asked for passcodes to his online accounts, he declined, requiring a warrant first. The search warrant detectives had at the time pertained to the house, but not to the contents of electronic devices.
That warrant would be provided later. But a safe found in his room was broken into by a SWAT team member, though “the contents of the safe were not of any interest,” his arrest report states. Devices were seized and examined in Volusia County, yielding CASM images and videos, 125 such items stored in a folder called “SemenBankData.”
An April warrant authorized the search of 18 DVD’s, disk drives and the like, which produced some of the CASM already analyzed, enabling the investigation to conclude with the 10 charges. McGill remained at the jail today. He requested and was assigned a public defender.
