A retired 65-year-old retired school teacher has been sentenced in a disturbing case of child sexual abuse images and videos.
Michael Paul Gillis, 65, Jacksonville, has been sentenced to 5 years and 10 months in federal prison for possessing images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of young children.
The court also ordered Gillis to serve a 10-year term of supervised release, register as a sex offender, and forfeit his computer media. Gillis pleaded guilty on April 27, 2022.
According to court documents and information provided in court, FBI agents were investigating individuals who were using a particular online network to share child sexual abuse materials.
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The investigation revealed that Gillis, a retired Jacksonville public school teacher, had accessed this network from his home.
On February 2, 2022, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Gillis’s home. Gillis, who was home at the time, admitted that he had been accessing child sexual abuse materials using the internet for the past 15 years, and that he had viewed materials depicting children as young as 3 years old.
Gillis also stated that he viewed these images and videos while employed as a schoolteacher and would fantasize about touching children inappropriately but claimed that he had never acted on it.
He acknowledged that he would continue to seek out these materials online because he would have “a hard time” stopping this behavior because it is an “urge.”
During the execution of the search warrant, FBI personnel seized several computers belonging to Gillis that contained at least 2,000 images and 150 videos depicting infants, toddlers, and other young children being sexually abused.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney D. Rodney Brown.
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