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Former band director arrested

A former Lewis County High School band director faces child pornography charges after being arrested Tuesday, following an investigation dating back to 2011.

Floyd Ellsworth Friend Jr., 40, of 107 Bland St., Weston, is charged with the use of minors in filming sexually explicit conduct, the possession of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and the distribution and display to a minor of obscene matter.

The West Virginia State Police alleged the acts occurred between November 2011 and May 2012. Friend resigned as the school’s band director in March 2012.

He is being held in the Central Regional Jail in lieu of a $150,000 bond. A preliminary hearing in Lewis County Magistrate Court is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday.

According to the complaint filed in Lewis County Magistrate Court, Trooper Z.T. Cooper was investigating a sexual abuse allegation when he received a case analysis report from the West Virginia State Police’s Digital Forensics Unit that stated 422 suspicious graphics, which included sexually explicit nude photographs of the alleged underage victim and Friend, were recovered from Friend’s cellular telephone and a memory card.

The complaint stated that the alleged victim was under the age of 18 during the time the photographs were allegedly taken.

The phone and memory card were obtained in May 2012 while the state police were executing a search warrant at Friend’s Weston residence, according to the complaint.

The complaint stated that the photographs depicted the alleged victim in sexually explicit positions and conducting sexually explicit acts while taking photographs of herself with her cellular telephone. The alleged victim’s phone was seized during a search of the alleged victim’s residence.

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