A former Southern Baptist youth pastor is facing more than 7,000 charges related to child sexual abuse after authorities found a large trove of child sexual abuse material in his possession.
John Tyler Moreland, 30, is the former director of students and families at Mount Zion Baptist Church. After the mother of a ten-year-old boy found pornographic images on his phone, investigators traced the information back to Moreland.
Here, they discovered he had been posing as a teenage girl to lure pubescent and pre-pubescent boys into sharing nude pictures of themselves. To entice them to do likewise, he would send nude pictures of young women while pretending to be them.
Investigators also linked the Snapchat logs to a device that was at Mount Zion Baptist Church for nearly two hours at a time when the church was closed, indicating that only staff would be there.
Moreland has been charged with one count of criminal use of a communication facility, one count of corruption of minors, 135 counts of photographing/filming/depicting on a computer a sex act, 135 counts of unlawful contact with a minor, and 6,770 charges of child sexual abuse material, for a total of 7,042 separate charges.
While Moreland is expected to spend at least 20 years in prison, Pennsylvania law treats each image and each distinct act of contact or depiction as a separate offense.
If a judge were inclined to impose the maximum sentence on each charge and run them consecutively, which includes up to seven years per single count of child sexual abuse material, he could face more than 47,390 years in prison.
