An Abilene man, formerly employed as a preschool teacher's assistant, has admitted guilt in a federal case involving the production of child pornography. Mark Penfield Eichorn, age 27, entered his guilty plea to the charges yesterday, according to an announcement from U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton.
In a document obtained by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas, Eichorn confessed to contacting two young boys through Snapchat, offering them money to create a sexually explicit video. The boys, aged 12 and 13, created and sent a 90-second video to Eichorn, after which he transferred them $200 via Venmo, an action that financial and phone records later confirmed to corroborate their accounts. Eichorn acknowledged to law enforcement that he knew the ages of the children when he requested the video. At his detention hearing, it was revealed that Eichorn, when questioned by federal law enforcement about the children in Georgia, responded with "just those two?" hinting at a disturbing casualness about the severity of his actions.
The fallout of these events sees Eichorn facing a potential 30 years in federal prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release. The investigation into the incident was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations' Dallas Field Division and the Abilene Police Department with support from the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office in Georgia. Assistant U.S. Attorney Whitney Ohlhausen has been charged with the prosecution of the case.
Details about the plea and court proceedings were published on the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas website, with Press Officer Erin Dooley available for contact. The case now proceeds to sentence, where Eichorn will formally learn his fate for the decisions to heinously exploit innocence and to fundamentally breach the duty of care inherently entrusted to someone responsible for the formative early years of our youngest citizens.
