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Press Release

Hollister Man Sentenced to 30 Years for Producing Child Porn

For Immediate Release
U.S. Attorney's Office, Western District of Missouri

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Hollister, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for producing child pornography.

 

Michael Shane Tyson, 31, of Hollister, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool to 30 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Tyson to a lifetime term of supervised release following incarceration.

 

Tyson, a former airline pilot, pleaded guilty on Sept. 10, 2015. He admitted that he sexually assaulted a 9-year-old child over a two-year period and created several videos of the abuse with his cell phone.

 

According to the plea agreement, a Hollister, Mo., police officer responded to Cox Hospital in Branson, Mo., on April 7, 2015, to a report of child molestation. The mother of the child victim told the officer that Tyson had sexually assaulted her daughter the previous week. The mother also told the officer that the abuse had been occurring over the past two years. The child victim did not report the abuse, she said, because Tyson had threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

 

The child victim was interviewed at the Branson West Child Advocacy Center. She reported that Tyson made videos of her with his cell phone. When she told Tyson she did not want to engage in sexual activities, the plea agreement says, he became angry and threatened her by brandishing a knife taken from a knife block in the kitchen.

 

Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Tyson’s residence and seized seven cell phones, two laptop computers and four flash drives. Investigators discovered several video recordings on one of Tyson’s cell phones in which he placed his phone in the bathroom and secretly recorded two additional child victims, of similar ages to the first victim, undressing, showering and drying off. Investigators also discovered videos and images of the sexual assault of the first child victim on Tyson’s laptop computer, along with 20 images of child pornography that had been downloaded over the Internet.

 

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ami Harshad Miller. It was investigated by the FBI.

 

Project Safe Childhood

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc . For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab "resources."

Updated May 10, 2016

Topic
Project Safe Childhood