A federal complaint unsealed Friday says Anchorage teaching assistant Daniel Brown, who was arrested on child pornography distribution and possession charges this week, had been downloading child pornography on his home computer for a decade, according to his own statement to law enforcement.
"He said that his downloading activity had escalated in the past couple of years, to the point of actively trading images as much as three times a week," FBI Special Agent Angela Strause wrote in the complaint filed Dec. 9.
Brown's online activity was discovered July 25 by an undercover officer with the national New Zealand police force. Brown was using a file-sharing system, the court records state.
The New Zealand officer found Brown had been sharing six folders, none of which was password-protected, that held 12 child pornography images and three video files. Three of the images described in the complaint showed boys between the ages of 3 and 8 performing sexual acts.
Brown, 33, was contacted by law enforcement officers Monday in the Huffman Elementary School classroom where he worked.
While they were speaking to him, other officers with a search warrant were at Brown's home and recovered his computer. Detectives found "dozens of image and video files that showed minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
Brown was was taken into custody shortly after 7 a.m., Anchorage School District spokeswoman Heidi Embley said. No students were present, and only a few staff members were in the building at the time, she said.
According to the complaint, Brown told law enforcement he used the popular search engine Yahoo as well as a Russian-based website to find child pornography. He estimated he had 100 gigabytes of child pornography on his computer, as well as more on an older computer and on a hard drive.