Woods Cross man gets 25 years in federal prison in child exploitation case

SALT LAKE CITY — A Woods Cross man who police say was an administrator for several online child pornography groups will spend 25 years in federal prison.

Landon Germaine was sentenced Thursday to 300 months in prison, U.S. District Court records show. At the end of his term, he'll be on supervised release for life.

The sentence was ordered to run concurrent with a second 25-year prison term imposed Thursday in a separate case.

Germaine was arrested in May 2020 and charged with sexual exploitation of children and enticing a minor. In exchange for pleading guilty in August 2022 to enticing a minor, prosecutors dropped the sexual exploitation of children charge.

In a separate case, Germaine faced the same charges — sexual exploitation of children and enticing a minor — but prosecutors instead dropped the enticement charge when he pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of children.

Agents from the FBI Child Exploitation task force served a search warrant at Germaine's residence in 2020 after receiving information that sexually explicit images of an 11-year-old girl had been sent to Germaine on a mobile app, according to a police affidavit.

A complaint filed in 2020 states that the girl lived in Arkansas and her mother, in 2018, reported finding explicit images and videos that her daughter was sending to various usernames through the apps Periscope and Kik. Police say Germaine was later connected to two of these usernames.

The mother contacted authorities a second time in 2020 after finding that her daughter was again communicating with the same usernames via Telegram, Snapchat and Periscope, the complaint states.

"Preliminary forensic review on scene on May 27, 2020, uncovered that Germaine possessed over 100 sexually explicit images/videos of minors ranging in age from approximately 8 to 16 years of age," the federal complaint states. "Germaine's digital media had evidence of numerous chats on various applications with female children. ... In these chats, Germaine repeatedly sought and asked for sexually explicit videos of these minor females."

Police said Germaine indicated he was a member and administrator for "numerous other known child pornography groups on social media applications and on the internet."

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