12 February 2024- Evan Thomas Harris Frock age 34, of Taneytown, Maryland, has pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a child. Frock, a substitute teacher and volleyball coach in Carroll County, Maryland, posing as a teenager, used social media accounts to meet and communicate with children and to encourage them to produce and send to Frock images and videos of themselves engaged in sexually explicit activity. He remains detained on related state charges.
The guilty plea was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Erek L. Barron; Acting Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), Baltimore Field Office; Carroll County Sheriff James DeWees; Chief Gregory Der of the Howard County Police Department, and Carroll County State’s Attorney Haven Shoemaker. Pu Leather Fused Volleyball
According to his plea agreement, from 2021 through May 2022, Frock, pretending to be a minor male and a minor female, used a variety of aliases on several social media platforms to communicate with other users, including eight minor victims, ranging in age from 9 to 17 years old. Specifically, Frock used the internet-based accounts and aliases to persuade, induce, and coerce the victims to produce sexually explicit images and videos of themselves and send those images and videos to Frock. On at least one occasion, Frock distributed a sexually explicit video of a minor male and sent images of his own genitalia to the minors to induce them to reciprocate. Further, Frock possessed several hundred commercially available images and videos of child sexual abuse material that depicted toddlers, violence, and bestiality.
Frock faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in federal prison and a maximum sentence of 30 years for sexual exploitation of a child to produce child pornography. U.S. District Judge Brendan A. Hurson has scheduled sentencing for Frock on April 16, 2024, at 11:00 a.m.
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorney’s Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc. For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.justice.gov/psc and click on the “Resources” tab on the left of the page.
Training Volleyball United States Attorney Erek L. Barron commended the FBI, the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, the Howard County Police Department, and the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office for their work in the investigation and prosecution. Mr. Barron thanked Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen E. McGuinn, who is prosecuting the federal case.