A former Rockwood police detective who fell for an online child-sex sting is headed to federal prison for more than a decade.
Charles Andrew Crothers, formerly with the Rockwood Police Department, was sentenced on June 23, 2026, to 151 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to attempted enticement of a child. U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan handed down the sentence in Knoxville. Crothers will also be on supervised release for the rest of his life and must register with state sex-offender registries once he is released.
Undercover operation, prosecutors say
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee, the case began with an undercover investigation by the Blount County, Alabama Sheriff’s Office. An officer there posed online as a 15-year-old. Prosecutors say Crothers contacted that undercover account, asked for nude photographs and sent explicit images of himself.
Investigators were able to identify him, prosecutors said, because photos he had sent earlier showed that he was an on-duty Rockwood detective. From there, federal agents and local authorities built the case that would eventually land him in front of a federal judge.
Department response
Rockwood Police Chief Kelly Pittman told WATE 6 On Your Side that Crothers was first suspended after his federal indictment in September 2024, then later fired from the department. The arrest and the federal proceedings that followed drew steady local attention as state and federal agencies coordinated their work on the case.
Sentence and prosecution
As laid out in the U.S. Attorney’s Office release, Crothers pleaded guilty to a single count of attempted enticement of a minor under a plea agreement. In return, prosecutors agreed to dismiss a related charge of attempted production of child pornography.
The release identifies FBI Special Agent Jordan Foreman as leading the investigation and notes that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kolman prosecuted the case for the federal government.
What the charge carries
Federal enticement cases like this are brought under 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b), which makes it a crime to use interstate commerce to persuade or entice a person under 18 to engage in sexual activity. The statute carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and allows for a maximum of life, according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.
Case timeline
Local coverage indicates that the indictment against Crothers was returned in early September 2024. He was arrested soon afterward and held in Laurel County, Kentucky, while the federal case moved forward. As reported by BBBTV12, court dates and trial settings were rescheduled more than once before the case ultimately ended with Crothers’s guilty plea and the sentencing in June 2026.
Prosecutors said the prosecution was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a U.S. Department of Justice initiative that coordinates federal, state and local efforts to combat online child exploitation. With the sentence now in place, the case closes as another example of how undercover online work and multi-agency cooperation are being used to identify and prosecute adults who target minors on the internet.
