A former Marine staff sergeant has been sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of distribution and possession of child pornography.
Jonathon Allen Frew, 33, pleaded guilty in August 2023 to the charges and was sentenced in federal court in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Wednesday. Following his 15-year prison term he also will have to serve 10 years of supervised release.
Naval Criminal Investigative Services opened an investigation on Frew after representatives on the instant messaging platform Kik reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that Frew had uploaded child pornography to the platform on five separate occasions, according to a news release.
Frew was serving on active duty at Cherry Point, North Carolina in April 2022, when the uploads occurred.
Using a search warrant, investigators found that Few had uploaded 24 images and videos of child pornography to a chat group in one day.
Police searched Frew’s home, seizing digital devices. They found about 250 images and 30 videos of child pornography on his phone.
Frew admitted to investigators that he would obtain the pornography and upload it to chat groups. His collection included images and videos of very young children, infants, toddlers and images depicting “sadistic and masochistic content,” according to court documents.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
