Retired elementary school teacher living in Fort Lauderdale sentenced on child porn charges
A retired principal living in Fort Lauderdale will spend the next 97 months — just over eight years — in prison on charges of possessing child pornography.
Frank Richard Beyer, 75, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz in Fort Lauderdale federal court.
Beyer, who is also known as Rick Beyer, according to court records, pleaded guilty in March and did not have a previous criminal record. So, he did not get the maximum sentence of 20 years.
Beyer was not teaching school in South Florida but had retired to Fort Lauderdale. He worked for the Syracuse city schools system in New York, including at Seymour Magnet School of International Humanities in the 1990s, according to Syracuse.com. His teaching career, which later included administration work, started in 1967 through his retirement in 2002, Syracuse district officials had said.
The case against Beyer
According to court records released by Ariana Fajardo Orshan, the U.S. attorney in South Florida, and George Piro, of the FBI’s Miami Field Office, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received multiple cyber tips that an online user had uploaded child pornography to internet platforms.
In April 2019, Google flagged a subscriber who had uploaded a picture of “a nude prepubescent child laying inside a tanning bed,” the Miami Herald reported in March when Beyer delivered his guilty plea. The email address used led Detective Nicholas Masters of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to Beyer, according to a Nov. 20, 2019, court affidavit.
On Nov. 20, officers used a search warrant to enter Beyer’s Fort Lauderdale condo, Orshan and Piro said in a news release. There, officers found external digital storage devices that contained multiple pictures and videos of children, some younger than 12, engaging in explicit sexual conduct with other children or adults.
A forensics exam of Beyer’s devices found nearly 4,000 pictures and over 1,200 videos of child pornography. He was also using Dropbox to get the images, Masters’ affidavit read.
According to Masters’ affidavit, Beyer admitted ownership of two email accounts — one on Gmail, the other on AOL — and that he used services such as Dropbox, Google, Apple iCloud, Mega.nz, Wickr, and WhatsApp to store and access the images.
“They also discovered that Beyer communicated with at least one person on an encrypted chat program and distributed child pornography to that person,” Orshan and Piro said.
Project Safe Childhood
The case against Beyer was brought as part of the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 12:28 PM.
