The FBI arrested a Pennsylvania police supervisor over child pornography charges on Sept. 10.
The federal agency spent nine months on the investigation before Lieutenant Timothy Woll was charged with transporting child pornography and accessing the content with the intent on watching it, Reading Eagle reported.
Cumru Township Police Chief Madison Winchester did not say whether Woll was fired or suspended, but did say that he was no longer on active duty.
“In the interest of parents and residents of the township, I can say he is not patrolling the township at this time,” Winchester said.
After Microsoft Corp. discovered that a user had downloaded child pornography images, they notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on Jan. 13.
The Berks County district attorney’s detectives identified Woll as the person who uploaded the photos depicting child pornography to his OneDrive account, according to court documents, WFMZ reported.
OneDrive is an online storage space run by Microsoft that allows users to store digital data (photos, files, videos, and music) and access them from any device.
Two months later, the FBI then got a search warrant that allowed them to search Woll’s residence at the 200 block of Shakespeare Drive for further evidence, Reading Eagle reported.
As a result, they found his external hard drive connected to his computer and seized them both.
While being questioned at the Cumru police station, Woll explained the possibility of accidentally “dragging and dropping” child pornography on the OneDrive folder of his work computer while erasing the drive of another laptop involved in a 2006 child pornography case that was already resolved, according to court documents, WFMZ reported.
But he couldn’t explain how child pornography was transferred from his home IP address to the OneDrive account.
Further examination revealed there were 300 thumbnail images from deleted child pornography video files on his external hard drive. These videos were previously on the same hard drive.
Nine thumbnail images taken from the deleted videos had the name of a particular female victim. Eight images on Woll’s computer depicted the same victim from the other nine thumbnail images, Reading Eagle reported.
