Fort Smith, Arkansas - Kenneth Elser, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, announced that Steven Lesmeister, age 39, of Green Forest, Arkansas, was sentenced on three counts of Stalking. Lesmeister was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for count one and 60 months in federal prison for count two, with these two terms to run concurrently with each other; He was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for count three with this term to run consecutively to the terms for the first two counts for a total of 105 months imprisonment and ordered to three years supervised release for each of the three counts to run concurrently. The Honorable P.K. Holmes, III presided over the sentencing hearing in the United States District Court in Fort Smith.
According to court records, on several occasions from June, 2014 to April, 2015, a 16 year old minor female in Virginia, a 19 year old female in New York, and a 14 year old minor female in North Carolina all began receiving sexually explicit and threatening text messages and sexually explicit videos of an unknown man on their phones from multiple email accounts. The man in the video would call them by their first name and told at least one of the victims that he knew her full name, address, type of car she drove, place of employment, and where she attended school. Lesmeister was subsequently located and arrested; officers seized and searched his IPad and IPhone revealing numerous email and social media accounts that he had created. His IPad contained the videos that had been sent to some of the victims. It was discovered that Lesmeister had sent hundreds of friend requests to teenage girls on Facebook where he was able to obtain their personal information that he then used to stalk them.
This case was investigated by Department of Homeland Security and the Northwest Arkansas Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce. Assistant United States Attorney Ashleigh Buckley prosecuted the case for the United States.
The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and their Criminal Division Child Exploitation and Obscenity Sections (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.
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Related court documents may be found on Public Access to Electronic Records Website @www.Pacer.gov
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
