Collinsville Resident Pleads Guilty to Access with Intent to View Prepubescent Child Pornography

Donald S. Boyce, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, announced today that on December 8, 2016, Jeremy T. Blair, 41, of Collinsville, Illinois, pled guilty to an indictment charging him with Access with Intent to View Prepubescent Child Pornography. Because Blair has a prior qualifying state predicate offense, he faces a term of imprisonment of not less than ten years but not more than twenty years, a fine up to $250,000 and a term of supervised release from five years to life. Blair will also have to register as a sex offender after he is released from prison. Blair’s sentencing has been scheduled for March 17, 2017, in East St. Louis, Illinois.

The charge arose when, in May 2015, during an undercover investigation conducted by the FBI in Fairview Heights, Illinois, an Internet Protocol ("IP") address was discovered that was sharing child pornography on a peer-to-peer network. A subpoena requesting subscriber information for this IP address eventually led the FBI to Jeremy T. Blair, a registered sex offender.

On July 17, 2015, a federal search warrant was executed at Blair’s residence. Among the items seized from the home was a Compaq desktop computer. A forensic examination of the Compaq desktop computer revealed 26 videos of child pornography in the recycle bin, all of which had been downloaded on June 16, 2015, and the majority of which involved prepubescent children.

These videos had all been previewed by Blair while he attempted to download the video to his computer via a file sharing program.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Springfield Child Exploitation Task Force. The case is assigned to Assistant United States Attorney Angela Scott.