A 50-year-old man will spend 26-1/2 years in prison for child exploitation and sex crimes after he was found guilty of traveling to Nashville to have sex with a 15-year-old girl, CNN affiliate WSMV reported.
James Frei, of Union Mills, North Carolina, was found guilty by a federal jury in February 2019 on four counts of production of child pornography, one count of enticing a minor to engage in sexual conduct, two counts of traveling in interstate commerce for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and one count of transporting child pornography, according to U.S. Attorney Don Cochran’s Office.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were notified about Frei when they received a cyber tip from Facebook in July 2016, indicating that Frei was engaging in sexually explicit conversations with the teenager and possibly had already traveled to Nashville to have sex with her, officials said.
The girl told detectives that she met Frei in May 2016 through a teen chat room on Facebook, and that he had traveled multiple times to Nashville to go to her house after her father had left for work, where they had sex, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department reported. The girl was then driven to a nearby park where they again had sex.
Frei returned to Nashville for a few days in June 2016 and on two occasions, he took the girl to a hotel near the airport and had sex. Frei also reportedly recorded the encounters with his phone, police said.
A search warrant of Frei’s home resulted in the seizure and examination of his phone which was found to have numerous videos and images of him having sex with the girl and over 500 images and videos of child porn. The investigation also found Frei had been downloading child porn for nearly 10 years and had participated in hundreds of sexual conversations with underage children.
Frei had previously been convicted of criminal offenses involving children in North Carolina and Michigan.