BENTON COUNTY, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — A Northwest Arkansas man found with nearly 600 images and videos of child sexual abuse material pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Kevin Don Lewis, 42, was arrested in May last year for drug charges. Multiple devices belonging to Lewis were seized in the process.
Court documents say that an associate of Lewis signed a cell phone out of police custody at his request and turned it over to Fayetteville police after discovering an image of a child performing a sex act on a man that was saved as the phone’s lock screen.
The phone and other devices in police custody were then searched by Bentonville police.
Court documents say that detectives spoke with multiple people familiar with Lewis, including the mother of one of his children.
Those individuals recounted that Lewis exposed children to pornography and attempted to entice children into participating in sexually explicit conduct.
Police found social media conversations involving Lewis that included subjects involved in the distribution of child pornography and that suggested Lewis has offended on multiple children.
Other messages show Lewis attempting to entice women into viewing child porn with him and openly admitting he enjoys watching it, as well as having child porn as his phone’s screensaver and attempting to entice a neighbor’s child over to his house.
In an exchange that court documents refer to as “alarming and heinous,” Lewis expressed interest in viewing a video showing the rape and murder of a child.
Lewis reportedly sent and received child porn images and videos, as well as child erotica material, over the course of several months.
A forensic report included in court documents says that 597 images and videos related to child porn were located on Lewis’ devices, with some of the subjects as young as two years old.
Lewis appeared in court on Dec. 8, 2022, and pleaded not guilty to 20 counts of distributing, possessing or viewing matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child.
Lewis’ jury trial was set to begin Oct. 3, but he pleaded guilty to all 20 counts during a pretrial hearing on Oct. 2.
