Police arrested a New York Times best-selling author on Wednesday in New Hampshire on child porn charges after authorities launched an investigation in March.
Sixty-four-year-old Brendan DuBois turned himself in after the Exeter Police Department executed a search warrant at his residence, TMZ reported Thursday.
An image shows the suspect:
The police agency had joined forces with the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce on the case. DuBois was arraigned on six counts of possession of child sexual abuse images, according to WMUR.
Prosecutors said a mountain of images was found on the suspect’s computer, and Exeter Police Detective Patrick Mulholland said, “At least 5,600 images were flagged as possible child sexual abuse images on his hard drive. Over 400,000 images were further located on his hard drive.”
Authorities began looking into the issue when Google alerted officials to stored images. In addition, DuBois allegedly typed into an online search about accidentally saving child porn to his Google Drive and asked it how he could tell if Google had reported him to law enforcement.
However, DuBois’s defense argued that the suspect had no part in manufacturing the images, claiming it appeared there was file sharing involved.
Mulholland pointed to the depraved nature of the images, stating, “This is graphic material involving sometimes multiple adults with one child, and, again, one case is an infant. And I will tell you, the case is still under investigation.”
The WMUR report noted DuBois co-wrote several books with author James Patterson, while the TMZ article noted that he is a former Jeopardy! champion.
“Severn River Publishing, which published his book ‘Terminal Surf,’ stated they’re deeply disturbed by the allegations against him … and have immediately suspended all promotion and sales of his books,” the TMZ article read.
In June, a Florida pastor was arrested on child porn charges after allegedly using cryptocurrency to buy such images online, Breitbart News reported. The outlet noted that he resigned from his position as pastor.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.