Georgia authorities arrested 19 men over the course of a four-day sting operation aimed at flushing out sexual predators keen to molest and/or traffic children. Among those charged was a failed Democratic politician who apparently previously discussed killing President Donald Trump online.
While ultimately executed from April 24 to 28 by the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the Georgia Internet Crimes against Children Task Force, Operation Lights Out was apparently the result of months of planning and the collaboration of 12 law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Secret Service.
Undercover investigators posing as children engaged in conversation with various suspects on social media, dating websites, and other online platforms. In a number of exchanges, suspects allegedly “directed conversations with the child toward sex.”
According to the GBI, 35 cases were established that met the threshold for arrest on the basis of the investigators’ interactions online. However, in the 19 cases that ultimately resulted in arrests, suspects attempted to meet the “child” in person.
In some of these cases, suspects provided authorities additional cause to make an arrest, allegedly sharing pornography and other obscene content to the individual they figured for a child or asking the “child” to produce and send child pornography.
The arrestees, whose ages range from 21 to 68 and included at least three illegal aliens, “traveled from areas around Columbus, Georgia, with the intent to meet a child for sex,” said the GBI. “GBI digital forensic investigators were on hand during the operation to forensically process 21 electronic devices that were seized as evidence during the operation.”
Carl Sprayberry, a Democrat who ran last year for election to the Georgia House of Representatives but lost in a landslide to Republican state Rep. Carmen Rice, was among the suspected predators charged with human trafficking.
‘Closely monitor your children to ensure they are not communicating with these individuals.’
According to the Gateway Pundit, Sprayberry tweeted in February from his now-suspended X account, “Donald Trump has committed an act of High Treason. Should Congress refuse to take action, he will be killed by the people, as per the Second Amendment’s existence.”
In a subsequent post, Sprayberry reportedly implied that a U.S. Secret Service agent “should shoot him,” adding, “It’s time to kill Trump. This is why the Second Amendment exists.”
In a Feb. 19 tweet, he apparently wrote, “bomb Mar-a-lago,” the president’s Florida residence.
When campaigning against Rice, Sprayberry called his Republican opponent an “extremist who is out of touch with Americans” and characterized her pro-life views as “morally repugnant.”
Muscogee County Sheriff Greg Countryman said during a press conference on Wednesday, “It takes a sick individual to want to take away a right that a child has and the freedom and the safety and the comfort that a child has to bring harm to these children.”
“There were no children at harm at all in this,” said Brian Johnston, GBI special agent in charge. “Had we not been there as law enforcement working in an undercover capacity, these very same perpetrators that were arrested would have been talking to our children in our community and they would have been talking about sexual acts and meeting up for sexual acts and exchanging pornography.”
“I want to make a plea with parents to closely monitor your children to ensure they are not communicating with these individuals,” said Countryman. “These predators will travel from near and far to victimize your children. We take these crimes against children very seriously. It will be our focus to find these predators so they may be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
GBI noted that individuals with information about these cases or other cases of child exploitation in Georgia should contact the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes Unit at 404-270-8870 or report via the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline at CyberTipline.org.
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Crime, Pedophile, Human trafficking, Trafficking, Georgia, Carl sprayberry, Gbi, Carl spraybery, Democrat, Pervert, Muscogee county sheriff, Politics