SUNCOAST MAN GETS 25 YEARS IN PRISON FOR CHILD PORNOGRAPHY

Amira Fox –  State Attorney

Matthew Cade has been sentenced to 25 years in prison followed by 10 years of sex offender probation, in a child pornography case. He was adjudicated guilty of 20 counts of Possession of Child Pornography, one count of Transmission of Material Harmful to a Minor, and one count of Use of a Child in a Sexual Performance.

The defendant did an open plea to the court. Defendants have the right to plea to the court for sentencing by the judge and give up their right to a jury trial. This is not a plea agreement.

Assistant State Attorney Alexa Lipham prosecuted the case.

In December 2020, the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office was notified by the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) about a cyber tip from the phone carrier, Verizon, about possible child pornography images on the defendant’s account. NCMEC confirmed the discovery of child sexual abuse material uploaded to a cloud server.

The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Unit obtained a search warrant for the defendant’s phone and did a forensic download. There were more than 300 videos of child sexual abuse material on the phone. Some of the videos contained children who appeared to be as young as 6-years-old, engaged in sexual acts.

The defendant had also been engaging in a video chat roulette on the app Omegle. It allows people to randomly talk to strangers via video. The defendant was engaging in live chats with children and directing them to perform various sex acts. He was also chatting with adults and asking them to show him child pornography as he did lewd acts on himself on video. These video interactions via the app were all on his phone. The defendant confessed to recording them so he could watch them later.