North Wilmington Man Sentenced To Six Years In Prison For Receipt Of Child Pornography

Jason Jay Mills, age 36, of Wilmington, Delaware, was sentenced today to six years in prison for receipt of child pornography via a website discovered by Italian law enforcement authorities.  Mills also was sentenced to five years of supervised release following his prison sentence.  He also will be required to register as a sex offender in any jurisdiction in which he lives, works, or attends school.  United States Attorney Charles M. Oberly, III made the announcement following Mills’ sentencing hearing before United States District Judge Richard G. Andrews.

According to statements made at today’s hearing and documents filed in court, Mills was a user of a child pornography website discovered by the National Centre for Combating Pedophilia Online (Centro Nazionale per il Contrasto alla Pedopornografia On-line, or C.N.C.P.O.) located within the Italian State Police Postal and Communication Service.  After executing a search warrant on the website servers, the C.N.C.P.O. was able to identify over 900 U.S.-based users of the website.  The C.N.C.P.O. provided the identities of these users to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, which has been conducting investigations of the identified individuals across the United States. 
On November 30, 2012, Wilmington-based Homeland Security Investigations agents arrested Mills and searched his North Wilmington residence, which was located just two blocks from Carrcroft Elementary School.  They found computers containing over 40,000 still images and movies of some of the most graphic and violent depictions of child sexual abuse uncovered by investigators who routinely work child pornography cases in Delaware.  The images featured mostly infants, toddlers and girls under age 8 being violently raped and assaulted.  In some images, the children appear to be deceased following the violent sexual abuse.  One image depicts a prepubescent girl with the following words over her naked torso: 

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY
BEHIND EVERY PICTURE IS
A CHILD HAVING A HELL OF
A GOOD TIME!

 In addition to the computers containing extremely violent child pornography featuring girls of elementary school age and younger, federal agents also found various dolls the size of toddlers, some of which had been used as sexual props or mutilated, in Mills’ residence.  Located with the computer equipment to which Mills downloaded tens of thousands of images of violent sexual abuse was a cache of assault weapons that Mills legally owned, including AR-15, M-4, and AK-47 assault rifles. 
Following the sentencing hearing, United States Attorney Charles M. Oberly, III thanked the Department of Homeland Security and the Italian State Police Postal and Communication Service for their collaborative efforts to work across an ocean to protect children:  “Two weeks before the tragedy that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, HSI agents removed Mills from his residence located two blocks from a local elementary school.  Mills, who openly expressed his hatred of children to investigators, was fixated on imagery depicting depraved violence inflicted upon school-aged girls and young women, and he was armed with a cache of some of the most fearsome assault weapons legally available for purchase by private citizens, including the same model rifle used in the Sandy Hook tragedy.  We are extremely grateful that the excellent work of our Homeland Security agents and our Italian law enforcement partners led to his arrest before he could harm children in ways beyond his online victimization of those depicted in the horrific images that he spent over a decade collecting.”  
This case is being investigated by the United States Department of Homeland Security, with assistance from Italy’s Centro Nazionale per il Contrasto alla Pedopornografia On-line, which is part of the Italian State Police Postal and Communication Service.  This case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Edward J. McAndrew.

For more information about reporting online child exploitation to the national CyberTipline, visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website at: www.missingkids.com.  For more information about the United States Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood program, visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/.