A Puyallup man has been slapped with a 15-year prison stint for his crimes involving the production and possession of child sex abuse images, U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman's office said on Thursday.

Shawn Stone, the 23-year-old culprit, was nabbed by authorities at Sea-Tac airport last August upon his return from Germany—and he didn't just have luggage in tow. With a slew of incriminating evidence pointing to his molestation of children on a 2019 trip which he captured and later disseminated online, Stone also confessed to snapping up and circulating nightmare-inducing images that showed the rape and torture of infants and young children.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones underscored the long-term impact of such atrocities, remarking, "The damage to young children doesn’t stop, it goes on a lifetime… Their pain continues and their suffering continues," according to the Justice Department's statement.

Stone's guilty plea came in January after the FBI, along with multiple Washington law enforcement agencies, connected him to the online sharing of abuse images in 2024. He now faces a quarter-century of supervised release, will register as a sex offender, and at a later hearing, Judge Jones will hammer out the restitution owed to over 20 victims who've lodged claims against him, which remains to be seen how much Stone will cough up after lawyers hash out the details.

The collaborative operation that brought Stone to justice-involved the FBI, Washington State Patrol, Tacoma Police Department, Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, Washington Department of Corrections, and US Army, as reported by the U.S. Attorney's Office. The case was in the hands of Assistant United States Attorney Matt Hampton.