Child pornography and sexual abuse suspect held on $1 million bail
Photo: Connor Kerns | Ventura County Jail
June 26, 2022 – Ventura County, Ca.
By the time 19-year-old Newbury Park resident Connor Kerns found cops standing on the front porch of his family’s home waving a search warrant in his face on the morning of June 20th, it was the culmination of 11 months of investigation conducted by no less than eight law enforcement teams.
According to Ventura County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Det. Rosalio Cobian, the case against Kerns began building in July, 2021 when the Ojai Patrol Division received a report that “a juvenile female was tricked into sending child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to a suspected adult male of a social media application.” It didn’t take detectives working out of the VCSD
Major Crimes Unit long to connect this illicit activity to Kerns.
At that point, Kerns was brought under the purview of the Thousand Oaks Sexual Assault Unit. Their further investigation indicated that the underage female victim had been sending Kerns “nude images and sexual videos via social media” and that he had both offered to pay her for additional videos and photos while simultaneously threatening to make her images public on multiple online social media platforms.
Kerns then raised the stakes by posing as an anonymous online hacker, threatening to “leak” her images and videos “if the juvenile did not participate in sexual acts” with him. She eventually acceded to his demands and met him in person, whereupon “he extorted sexual acts” from her.
At this point, agents from the Ventura office of the FBI and investigators from the Los Angeles Bureau of Homeland Security were brought into the case pursuant to evidence collected by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children identifying Kerns as a suspect in contact with multiple other juvenile females on other states.
Pursuant to the service of the search warrant on Kerns’ residence on June 20 th , he was taken into custody and transported to the Ventura County Jail, where he was book on 22 counts of child pornography and sexual assault. He remains in custody with his bail set at $1,000,000.
