ST. LOUIS (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Missouri) – U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry on Thursday sentenced a registered sex offender who sold child pornography online to 17 years in prison.
Patrick Mayberry, now 46, of High Ridge, told investigators that he’d received over $2,000 by selling child pornography that he’d obtained on the dark web. Mayberry had multiple videos containing child sexual abuse material in his MEGA cloud-storage account.
The investigation began with a CyberTipline report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that Mayberry had uploaded child sexual abuse material to his Google account.
Mayberry pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in St. Louis in November to one count of possession of child pornography as a prior offender.
Mayberry is a registered sex offender and was on probation at the time of the offense. He was convicted of one count of failure to register as a sex offender in 2021 in Jefferson County Circuit Court in Missouri. In 2008, he was convicted of one count of attempting to procure child pornography for seeking nude photographs of a nine-year-old. In 2003, he was convicted of second-degree rape of a victim under age 16 in Oklahoma.
The St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson prosecuted the case.
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Department of Justice Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.