MADISON COUNTY, Ohio – Donald Adams, 52, from Mount Sterling, was sentenced to 240 months in prison for acts of exploiting minors online and circulating child abuse materials on Tuesday.
“In May 2023, Adams confessed to two charges of sexual exploitation of minors and two of sharing child pornography,” the court records state.
The documents further revealed that “between May and September 2021, Adams deceived two teenagers through platforms like Snapchat and Google Duo, manipulating them into sharing explicit content.” He gave these minors the illusion that they were in a genuine romantic relationship.
One alarming detail is that “Adams also directed at least one minor to share the distressing content with other online predators.”
The narrative gets darker, stating, “Adams went to another state to personally fetch one of the victims, and they spent three hours in a hotel.”
By September 2021, things escalated when “he sent videos showing children aged 3 to 7 in inappropriate situations to an undercover FBI agent online.”
The extent of his crimes became even clearer after his arrest. “Over 1,500 images and 2,000 videos of child abuse were found in Adams’s possession, with victims ranging from infants to toddlers,” the records note.
In conclusion, “part of Adams’s sentence includes compensating the minors he exploited, as well as eight other victims identified in his materials, as reported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”