Child Porn Case: Fairfax County Man Sentenced

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA -- Lucas Aronson, 31, of Fairfax County, was sentenced Friday to 204 months (17 years) in prison for production of child pornography, enticing minors to engage in sexually-explicit conduct online and recording the acts, according to an announcement from the Office of United States Attorney Dana J. Boente, Eastern District of Virginia.

Aronson was also ordered to serve a lifetime of supervised release, register as a sex offender upon release from prison, and to pay a total of $20,000 in restitution to his victims.

Aronson pleaded guilty August 23. According to admissions made in connection with his plea, Aronson posed as a minor girl while using video and text chat websites to chat with minor girls online, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in its announcement. Aronson engaged in sexually explicit chats and enticed some of the minors to engage in sexually explicit activity on web camera and recorded the videos, which he maintained on a thumb drive that was found in his residence, authorities said. In January 2015, Aronson was arrested after streaming a video of a toddler-aged female engaged in sexually explicit conduct with an adult male on a chat website, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

This investigation was a part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and CEOS, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.

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