“How Secret Service agents caught a child sex abuser distributing [Child Sex Abuse Material]”

[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of Michael Berman.]

How Secret Service agents caught a child sex abuser distributing CSAM – The Washington Post (Jun.11, 2025), by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a fascinating and disturbing description of the use of electronically stored information, by dedicated law enforcement officers, to find, apprehend, and bring to justice a person who distributed child sex abuse material. The distributor was sentenced to 100 years in prison plus additional life sentences.

The article begins with Secret Service Agent Tanner Hubbard receiving an urgent message about “chilling videos discovered on an online forum by undercover police in Australia. They showed the sexual abuse of two very young girls. Time stamps indicated they were filmed somewhere in the eastern United States.”

Based on his experience, Agent Hubbard felt that the abuse was “taking place now.” Hubbard worked with Ryan Heethuis, and other Secret Service colleagues. Reyna Shelton provided forensic services.

The Washington Post article is based on court records and interviews of Secret Service personnel. It states:

Despite the central role of computers and the internet in Hubbard’s investigation, technology could not help with its most crucial steps. Cracking the case required long hours of manual work, dozens of people from across the Secret Service and flashes of human ingenuity.
How Secret Service agents caught a child sex abuser distributing CSAM – The Washington Post (Jun.11, 2025).

The perpetrator stayed off camera. However, agents were able to assemble fragments “like a jigsaw puzzle to create a facial composite,” the story reports. However, that was not enough.

“They scrutinized the writing on a piece of clothing visible in one clip, tried to figure out which company had manufactured the carpet in the room and noted the sex toys seen in some of the videos.” Id. Those avenues did not “pan out.”

The “breakthrough” was a crib in the background. The article states:

[Agent Hubbard] turned to Google, using search queries like “black crib with gray arch with white emblem and hard plastic corners” to try to discover where it came from. After scrolling through the results, he sent a message to Heethuis, whose alert from Amsterdam had started the hunt. “I was like, ‘Hey man, I think I found the crib that’s in the video,’” he recalled.
Id.

Heethuis contacted the exclusive seller of the crib. It had only been sold online. Walmart provided 12,000 records of purchases. Investigators filtered it down to 4,500 records. Forty volunteers agreed to work on the records.

I was like, “Hey man, I think I found the crib that’s in the video.”
Tanner Hubbard, U.S. Secret Service Agent.

Agents also enhanced an image of a diaper on the video and got the serial number. “Heethuis sent it to Pampers and asked where the box it came from had been shipped to. Monday afternoon in Washington, the answer came back: The diaper belonged to a lot sent to Ohio.”

At the same time, searchers hit on a Walmart record from Cincinnati as a possible suspect. They thought that the crib orders pointed to him.

They compared the suspect’s photo with the previously-prepared composite photo and felt that they had a match.

“We were just, like, ‘Yep, that’s him, that’s 100 percent him,’” Hubbard recalled. “We immediately knew, looking at the nose, looking at the way the eyebrows were shaped, his hair, the curvature of his forehead, and his facial hair, how it came to a rounded point at the bottom of his chin.”
Id.

Hubbard requested a warrant. Agents were watching the suspects residence.

As Hubbard and his colleague sat in their car waiting for local police to arrive, he received an email informing him that while he wrote the warrant last night, Davis had produced another video. The need to take Davis into custody couldn’t have felt any more urgent.
Id.

The suspect was arrested five days after Hubbard received the videos. The Post reports:

Searching the house, the SWAT team discovered a memory card at the bottom of the toilet, which was later found to have child sex abuse material on it. Davis appeared to have attempted to flush it down in the moments before he emerged from the house, Hubbard said in an interview.
Id.

The suspect eventually confessed. The Post notes that: “Such successes are relatively rare, she said, because of how under-resourced law enforcement agencies are in relation to the high volume of complaints they receive.” [emphasis added].

Kudos to the dedicated Secret Service agents, and to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee and the Washington Post for a superb and disturbing article. There are many details in the article that are not discussed in this blog. See How Secret Service agents caught a child sex abuser distributing CSAM – The Washington Post.

Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM GAI and LLM Policy.

Author

Michael D. Berman

Mike is the owner of E-Discovery, LLC, and of counsel at Rifkin Weiner Livingston LLC, in Baltimore. He concentrates on commercial litigation and offers mediation services. He was the primary editor of Electronically Stored Information in Maryland Courts (Md. State Bar Ass’n. 2020), and he co-edited M. Berman, C. Barton, and P. Grimm, eds., Managing E-Discovery and ESI: From Pre-Litigation Through Trial (ABA 2011), and J. Baron, R. Losey, and M. Berman, eds., Perspectives on Predictive Coding (ABA 2016). Mike has litigated a number of cases in the trial and appellate courts in Maryland. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law where he co-teaches a three-credit discovery workshop that focuses on e-discovery. He has lectured at the Maryland Judicial College and he chaired the Bar committee that drafted the proposed ESI Principles for the District of Maryland. He is a past: co-chair of the Federal District Court Committee of the Maryland State and Federal Bar Associations; chair of the Litigation Section Council, Maryland State Bar Association; and, co-chair of the American Bar Association Litigation Section Book Publishing Board. He graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law and is also an Army veteran. He is admitted to the Maryland bar. The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Rifkin Weiner Livingston LLC.
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