North Fort Myers man sentenced for child pornography, propositioning minor

A North Fort Myers man has received his prison sentence after being arrested and tried on charges of crimes against children.

U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Barber sentenced Frederick Charles Trueblood, Jr., 47, to 14 years in federal prison for attempting to coerce and entice a minor to engage in sexual activity and for possessing images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of children, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Trueblood was also sentenced to a 10-year concurrent prison term for attempting to transfer obscene material to a minor, and was ordered to serve a life term of supervised release and to register as a sex offender.

Trueblood had pleaded guilty on Oct. 30, 2020.

According to court documents, FBI agents began an undercover investigation to identify people who approach children in online chat rooms to lure them into sexual activity. Between May 13 and 14, 2019, Trueblood sent an unsolicited chat message to what he believed was a 13-year-old girl but was actually an undercover agent. During the chat, Trueblood asked the “child” to send him graphic nude images exposing herself to him, and sent multiple explicit pictures of himself to the “child”.

On August 23, 2019, FBI agents searched Trueblood’s home and seized his computers. During an interview with agents, he admitted that he had used the chat site “just for sexual fun.” He admitted that quickly after meeting kids on the chat site that he would have sexually explicit conversations with them and that he had sent explicit pictures to many children on the chat site, and that another chat site had actually banned him for sending such pictures to kids. A forensic examination of Trueblood’s computers revealed numerous images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of young children that he had been collecting since May 2018.