Columbus man, 53, gets 30 years for baiting 11-year-old to send nude photos

A Columbus man was sentenced on Monday to 30 years in federal prison after entering a guilty plea to receipt of child pornography.

William Tooley, 53, pleaded guilty in front of U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land in the Columbus federal courthouse. In addition to the 30 years, Land sentenced Tooley to 25 years supervised release if he gets out of prison.

He will have to serve the entire sentence because there is no parole in the federal system.

According to facts presented in court, the mother of an 11-year-old boy in another state discovered that her son had been sending nude photos of himself to someone she suspected was posing as a teenage boy. The victim told his mother he had been texting someone he knew as “Mason,” who lived in Georgia.

During those text conversations, “Mason” asked the victim to send him sexually explicit photos over the internet.

Due to the interstate nature of the crime, it was turned over to Homeland Security Investigations. Mason turned out to be Tooley, who was a registered sex offender living in Georgia. He had two separate convictions in Michigan for 4th degree criminal sexual conduct involving a minor and another for accousting a child for immoral purposes.

“This sentenced recommended to and imposed by Judge Land virtually assures that this repeat sexual offender will spend the rest of his days in a federal penitentiary, where he belongs and he can no longer prey on innocent children,” said U.S. Attorney Charles E. Peeler stated in a news release. “It also spares the young victim in this case the additional trauma of having to testify about Mr. Tooley’s predacations in a public courtroom.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Crawford Seals was the lead prosecutor.

This story was originally published January 29, 2018 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Columbus man, 53, gets 30 years for baiting 11-year-old to send nude photos."