Child Porn Defendant Employed At Joliet Public District 86, Filmed Students From Janitor's Office: Prosecutor

JOLIET, IL — The Will County State's Attorney's Office of Jim Glasgow has filed a petition to deny pretrial release for child pornography defendant Jeremy Ledesma, who has a Plainfield mailing address and is employed as a custodian for Joliet Public School District 86 and at Eisenhower Academy.

Court documents filed on Friday reveal that the Will County Sheriff's Office had been investigating Ledesma for much of the past year. The sheriff's department executed a search warrant at his home in the 6900 block of Twin Falls Drive in late September.

According to Friday's petition, Ledesma, 23, now faces three counts of child pornography, and his pretrial detention hearing will take place next week. He was booked into the Will County Jail on Thursday afternoon.

On Sept. 30, Will County Sheriff's deputies went to the house in the Plainfield area and Ledesma revealed that he lived in the basement. Deputies found a gaming computer, two laptops, external hard drives and one silicone sex toy that was the approximate age of a small child, court documents show.

The sheriff's investigation began last May when they learned that a Snapchat user was uploading child pornography, and that person was later identified as Ledesma, court documents allege. Some of the child porn images showed two young boys exposing their genitalia, prosecutors noted.

Will County Sheriff's detectives also learned that Ledesma's Snapchat account received several emails advising that his account was violating Snapchat's guidelines related to child sexual abuse materials, court documents indicate.

Some of the videos obtained from Ledesma's room contained a nude female toddler with an adult man masturbating and touching the toddler's private parts, court documents show.

Prosecutors also pointed out that four other videos were taken at Joliet's Eisenhower Academy Elementary School and "were not deemed to be" child sexual abuse material, "but were of children."

The four videos "appeared to be taken at Eisenhower Academy Elementary School from what is believed to be the janitor's office," the petition to deny pretrial release indicated. "Each of those videos had a latitude and longitude that generated at the time they were created that was consistent with that school. Those videos depicted children playing on the playground. (In) one of those videos, a male voice can be heard as the children are being filmed yelling, 'f***, I'm trying to get a picture of the white boy.'"

Authorities noted that one of the laptops recovered from Ledesma's bedroom showed it was equipped with a VPN to block Internet Provider addresses and had bit torrent for peer to peer file sharing of encrypted materials, "commonly used with the dark web," as well as "emails from MEGA, "which is a file storing app known to be associated with" child sexual abuse material files.

Following his arrest, Ledesma filled out paperwork for Will County's judicial branch listing Joliet Public School District 86 as his employer. He stated that he makes $2,400 as his monthly income and that he owns a 2023 Mazda that is worth $31,000.

Meanwhile, the Joliet Public School District 86 meeting agenda for next week does not contain Ledesma's name as part of its list of personnel changes that goes before the school board. The next regular meeting for the District 86 school board is at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at the J.F. Kennedy Administrative Center on Raynor Avenue.

"The administration is reviewing the charges and will take appropriate action," Sandy Zalewski, director for communications and development with Joliet Public Schools District 86, notified Joliet Patch on Friday evening.