A retired principal spent 35 years in schools. He’ll do up to 20 in prison for child porn
A retired principal living in Fort Lauderdale will spend the next chunk of his golden years living behind iron bars after pleading guilty in federal court to child pornography possession.
Frank Richard Beyer, a 75-year-old also known as “Rick Beyer,” will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz on May 18 in Fort Lauderdale federal court. With a guilty plea and without a criminal record, Beyer’s unlikely to get the maximum sentence of 20 years.
Before Beyer moved to Fort Lauderdale, he was a Syracuse City Schools principal, according to one database. After Beyer was charged in December, the Syracuse Post-Standard and other Syracuse-area media outlets reported that Syracuse City Schools confirmed he worked for the district from 1967 through 2002.
A triple shot of child pornography Cybertips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led detectives to the door of Beyer’s condominium, Beyer’s admission of facts says.
In April 2019, Google noticed a subscriber uploaded a picture of “a nude prepubescent child laying inside a tanning bed with an erect penis” to the account linked to rickbefll@gmail.com. Dropbox already had sent two Cybertip reports that rickbefll@gmail.com had uploaded 20 files of child pornography, including a video of two boys performing oral sex on each other.
“While reviewing the Google account, law enforcement located an email from “Mega.nz,” which is a cloud storage platform that is hosted outside of the United STates and fully encrypted,” Beyer’s admission of facts says. “Mega.nz recently has been identified by (Internet Crimes Against Children) investigators as a place that is utilized by subjects who are attempting to store child pornography and benefit from the encryption provided.”
Beyer was using 200GB of storage on the cloud.
Dropbox records said the account subscriber called himself “Rick Beyer” and his file names included, “Chinese Little Boy Like 11yo Was (rhymes with “clucked”) By Man...” “Gay Teen 15Yo Boys Orgy (Drinking Boys Drunk Orgy).avi” and “[boy+man] Scott 11yo and man.MPG.”
Beyer admitted using the aforementioned services as well as Apple iCloud, Wickr and WhatsApp. He paid for a VPN to hide his IP address.
Hitting Beyer’s apartment with a search warrant, the admission said, yielded two SanDisk 256GB USB drives with videos showing such things as an adult male raping a boy via oral sex and forced masturbation.
This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 4:26 PM.
