Man indicted on federal child porn charge; over 17,000 images of explicit content found on phone

   

SALMON — A federal grand jury has indicted a Salmon man on federal child pornography charges after his Idaho district court charges were dismissed in April.

Ronald Benjamin Jenkins, 45, was charged with one felony count of distributing child porn. If he is found guilty, he faces a potential punishment of five to 20 years in prison.

According to court documents, Jenkins was initially charged with 20 felony counts of possessing child porn, and a persistent violator enhancement. These were dismissed in favor of the federal charge.

The documents state that a detective with the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office, part of the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, was following up on a cybertip from October.

The cybertip came from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which stated some internet companies reported images of child porn being uploaded through their applications.

Additionally, a probation officer contacted the Bonneville detective after a probationer’s dad contacted the officer about the contents of his son’s phone. The probationer was identified as Jenkins.

Jenkins was in jail at the time for a different charge out of Lemhi County (see links below). He had given his phone to his father to take care of his affairs.

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The document states, the father began to use his son’s phone and clicked on a folder which showed “multiple sexual pictures of nude children exposing themselves on his son’s phone.”

“Jenkins was interviewed in the Bonneville County Jail, where he admitted to downloading images while living in his truck in the Walmart parking lot in Ammon,” the document states.

During his discussion with the detective, the 45-year-old said he used a TOR browser, which is often used to access the “dark web,” where he got the images.

When asked what type of child porn would be found on his phone, the man responded with pictures of 13-year-old girls and around 300 images.

“Jenkins said that he downloaded the images in September of this year and used them for his own sexual gratification,” the document states.

A search warrant was obtained, and Idaho Falls Police helped in the search of Jenkins’s phone.

The document states approximately 17,782 images of child porn were found on the man’s phone. The images showed children as young as infants to 12 years old exposing themselves, being sexually abused and bestiality.

The detective found over 1,300 website addresses when Jenkins accessed the TOR browser, which included searches of, “8 and 9 year old girls engaged in sexual acts with an animal, preteen and toddler rape among other pedophilic titles.”

The document states Jenkins had used a cloud sharing link to share the images of child porn with other people.

The detective looked at the link, which resulted in a folder that contained 74 images of child porn and had two images of Jenkins. The photos of Jenkins were used to match his booking photo with the tattoos on his person.

Jenkins had also used Google, Safari and a Russian web browser, which contained searches and saved links to explicit content about children.

He is not currently scheduled for another court hearing. Jenkins is serving a rider in the Idaho State Correctional Center in Kuna for drug crimes committed in Lemhi County.

Though Jenkins has been charged with these crimes, this does not necessarily mean he committed them. Everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

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