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TALLAHASSEE, FL – Attorney General Bill McCollum and St. Petersburg Chief of Police Chuck Harmon today announced that a St. Petersburg man is in custody on charges of child pornography possession and promotion. CyberCrime investigators determined Gary Lee Peel had created and was maintaining a website offering images and videos of child pornography. He was arrested this morning by law enforcement officers with the Attorney General’s CyberCrime Unit with assistance from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the St. Petersburg Police Department.

A tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children indicated that an individual had uploaded what appeared to be a video of child pornography onto a video sharing website. CyberCrime investigators traced the video back to Peel’s computer and discovered he was also operating a website for viewing and downloading child pornography. A search warrant was executed at his St. Petersburg home, where hundreds of images of child pornography were discovered. Law enforcement officers seized two computers and other equipment, which will undergo additional forensic analysis.

According to CyberCrime investigators, Peel, 20, admitted he not only had the images of child pornography in his possession, but also that he was actively searching for additional images and further distributing the images he found via his website. Many of the images discovered were of children as young as infants. The website was immediately shut down by law enforcement and is the first child pornography website taken offline by the Attorney General’s Tampa CyberCrime Task Force.

Peel is a computer engineering student at St. Pete College. He was booked into the Pinellas County Jail and will be charged with two counts of promoting child pornography, a second-degree felony, and 20 counts of possession of child pornography, which will be enhanced to a second-degree felony due to the nature and number of images in his possession.