In St. Louis, U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry sentenced Patrick Mayberry, a 46-year-old registered sex offender from High Ridge, to 17 years in prison for selling child pornography online. Mayberry admitted to receiving over $2,000 from distributing child pornography acquired from the dark web, and investigators found multiple videos of child sexual abuse material in his MEGA cloud-storage account.
The case was initiated following a CyberTipline report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, indicating that Mayberry had uploaded child sexual abuse material to his Google account. Subsequently, Mayberry pleaded guilty in November to one count of possession of child pornography as a prior offender.
Mayberry, who was on probation at the time of this offense, was previously convicted in 2021 for failing to register as a sex offender in Jefferson County Circuit Court, Missouri. His criminal history includes a 2008 conviction for attempting to procure child pornography involving a nine-year-old and a 2003 second-degree rape conviction of a victim under the age of 16 in Oklahoma.
The investigation was conducted by the St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI, while Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson led the prosecution. This case is part of Project Safe Childhood, a U.S. Department of Justice initiative launched in 2006. The project aims to address child sexual exploitation and abuse by utilizing federal, state, and local resources to locate and prosecute offenders and to rescue victims.
For more details on Project Safe Childhood, visit the Department of Justice's website at www.justice.gov/psc.