BOND DENIED TO MT.PLEASANT MAN TIED TO 20 COUNTS OF CHILD SEX CRIMES

Josephine Rodriguez CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, SEX OFFENDERS AND OTHERS WHO REOFFEND

February 5, 2020
Anne Emerson
ABC News 4

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (WCIV) — Bond denied.
That’s the big takeaway on Wednesday for a Mount Pleasant man who police said sexually abused children in Mount Pleasant and in Summerville.
Police said they recovered evidence of the abuse as well as a large amount of sexually explicit images of children on his cellphone.
Court documents stated that all of the evidence came thanks to a cyber tip. Officials added that these kinds of tips are critical.
Officials described it as walking into a police station telling the cops you just witnessed a bank robbery. They are going to look into it.
Edward Leroy Allen III faces 20 counts of child pornography and sexual abuse. The judge said she was gravely concerned at the mounting evidence and, therefore, couldn’t set bond.
54-year-old Edward Allen lived and worked in Mount Pleasant up until late January.
An 18-year-old told police the abuse started in 2015.
Another 15-year-old child said he’d been abused by Allen for a year.
ABC News 4 spoke with the special investigator in charge of receiving those tips for South Carolina.
He said they often come in through social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
There are more than 1,600 apps alone that feed tips of inappropriate content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
“NCMEC does all of the background and the analysts are awesome. They are so good at what they do. They work up everything they can find on this particular person,” explained Special Investigator Jason Hughes with the South Carolina Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children.
Once NCMEC finds identifiers like emails and phone numbers, they send tips to law enforcement.
“We send a court order for each one of these identifiers. We can identify who that person is and once we get that info back, that’s when we start to narrow it down and do a search warrant,” stated Hughes.

https://abcnews4.com/news/local/bond-denied-to-mount-pleasant-man-tied-to-20-counts-of-child-sex-crimes

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