LOGAN — A 49-year-old Logan man facing child pornography charges has been arrested again for allegedly violating the terms of his pretrial release. Brady Lynn Thurston was booked into the Cache County Jail, Friday afternoon, a week after probation agents claimed the suspect hadn’t complied with a judge’s orders.
According to an arrest affidavit, Logan City Police officers received a cyber-tip in September from a cloud-based storage provider for Verizon wireless. They reported a user had uploaded files to their servers containing depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
The company provided officers with 79 files believed to be child sexual abuse material. Officers reviewed the material and found all but one was child pornography.
Police were able to determine Thurston was the owner of the user account by tracking his phone number and IP address, according to court documents.
Officers were able to secure a warrant to obtain the rest of the material allegedly saved to the account. They received multiple folders from the company, with an additional several hundred images of child sexual abuse material.
The images depicted children ranging from approximately 4 to 16-years-old. The kids were “in various states of undress and in various forms of sexual positions,” police wrote in the probable cause statement.
Oct. 29, officers served a warrant to Thurston’s home, where he was living with two other family members. They seized his cell phone and laptop computer, for further inspection.
Thurston reportedly refused to answer questions from police and requested an attorney. He was later booked into jail.
Thurston was charged in Logan’s 1st District Court with 20 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, a second-degree felony. He was later released on $10,000 bail.
As part of the pretrial release, Judge Angela Fonnesbeck had prohibited Thurston from any unsupervised contact with minors except for his own children. She also barred him from using the internet except for the purposes of his employment.
Thurston is scheduled to appear in court Jan. 27. He could face more than 15 years in prison, if convicted.