Lemons

BUCKHANNON – An Upshur County man is facing a child pornography charge after police allegedly found in his home dozens of media discs containing hundreds of sexually explicit images involving children.

Roy Wayne Lemons, 41, has been charged with possession of child pornography, greater than 600 images. He is being held in the Tygart Valley Regional Jail on a $100,000 cash only bond.

According to the criminal complaint, prepared by Senior Trooper C.D. Harper of the West Virginia State Police, in August 2022, he received a cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding an apparent child pornography image being uploading using an IP address “with an approximate location of Buckhannon.”

In December 2022, a second cyber tip was submitted by Bing/Microsoft to the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office, about child sexual abuse material being uploaded to the same IP address, the complaint states.

After receiving administrative subpoenas, Frontier Communications provided a name, address and phone number for the subscriber using that IP address, according to the complaint.

Harper was assigned to investigate a third cyber tip in July 2023, involving the same IP address. On July 13, 2023, Harper and Sgt. S. Loudin went to the address provided by Frontier and spoke to the residents there, including Lemons, the complaint states.

At that point, Lemons allegedly admitted “to having just recently viewed child pornography on the internet,” according to the complaint. The officers obtained written consent to search the residence, and began in Lemons’ bedroom. Harper “began noticing numerous DVD discs with handwritten titles … that included the abbreviated letters ‘CP.'” Lemons allegedly admitted to Loudin that “CP” stood for “child pornography.”

In the bedroom search, officers allegedly found 184 DVDs, a USB drive, two hard drives, a notebook with handwritten website URLs related to explicit material involving children, a tablet, a desktop computer, an Xbox gaming system, and a 16 GB SD card.

Harper reviewed the contents of five of the 184 disks, and determined that they contained 1,840 total minutes of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, amounting to approximately 27,600 images, the complaint states.

Lemons was booked into TVRJ on Tuesday.