Lucas Aronson, 31, of Alexandria, was sentenced on Nov. 18 to 204 months in prison for production of child pornography, enticing minors to engage in sexually-explicit conduct online and recording the acts. Aronson was also ordered to serve a lifetime of supervised release, register as a sex offender upon release from prison, and to pay a total of $20,000 in restitution to his victims.
Aronson pleaded guilty on Aug. 23. According to admissions made in connection with his plea, Aronson posed as a minor girl while using video and text chat websites to chat with minor girls online. Aronson engaged in sexually explicit chats and enticed some of the minors to engage in sexually explicit activity on web camera and recorded the videos, which he maintained on a thumb drive that was found in his residence. In January 2015, Aronson was arrested after streaming a video of a toddler-aged female engaged in sexually explicit conduct with an adult male on a chat website.
Dana J. Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; Leslie R. Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; Colonel Edwin C. Roessler Jr., Fairfax County Chief of Police; and Clark E. Settles, Special Agent in Charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Washington, made the announcement after sentencing by U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga.
This investigation was a part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat child sexual exploitation.