A 20-year-old Milwaukee man has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy he groomed online for three years, resolving a case that began with the child's disappearance from Illinois and ended with the man being shot by police during a violent arrest attempt. Emilio Arner-Ortiz entered his pleas last week and is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
Arner-Ortiz pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a child and to intentionally pointing a firearm at a person, and pleaded no contest to using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime, according to FOX6 News Milwaukee. As part of the deal, prosecutors dismissed charges of child abduction, child enticement, and three counts of possessing child pornography, though those five charges will be read in at sentencing. The Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office originally charged Arner-Ortiz in January 2025 in connection with an investigation that began in fall 2024, and he has remained in custody since his arrest.
A Three-Year Discord Relationship Turns Into a Cross-State Disappearance
The case traces back to an online relationship that started years earlier. Court records relayed by WTMJ indicate Arner-Ortiz communicated with the boy for three years on the messaging platform Discord under the alias “Tres,” posing as a 16-year-old and discussing pederasty. The boy's parents eventually discovered the Discord chats on their son's laptop in late 2024.
According to the FOX6 account of the criminal complaint, the 13-year-old was reported missing out of Alsip, Illinois, after initially lying to his parents about being in Chicago's south suburbs. The boy later told investigators he had run away with someone he had been talking to online, who he believed was 16 and described as his boyfriend. A separate WTMJ report states Arner-Ortiz picked the boy up in Alsip on November 7, 2024, provided him alcohol, drove him to Milwaukee, and at one point let the boy hold an unloaded firearm as the two discussed committing suicide together. Milwaukee police found the boy that same day at 6th and Oklahoma, though he initially refused to say how he had ended up in the city.
Parents Returned to Police After Finding a Photo
The boy's parents went back to their south suburban police department in December 2024 after finding a picture of a man on their son's computer, per the FOX6 report. The victim identified the man in the chats as “Emilio Arner,” and the boy told investigators he had sex with the man at his home.
The break in the case led Milwaukee police officers to a home near 7th and Arthur on December 24, 2024, where they had gone looking for Arner-Ortiz. Prosecutors said Arner-Ortiz pulled out a gun and struggled with an officer at the scene, and the officer shot him. WTMJ's earlier reporting on the incident places the shooting on January 6, 2025, and describes Arner-Ortiz shouting “suicide by cop” and struggling over the unloaded weapon in the kitchen before he was shot; the dossier does not resolve the discrepancy between the two reported dates. Arner-Ortiz was hospitalized and made his initial court appearance from his hospital bed.
Judge Called the Case “Extremely Disturbing”
At that January 13, 2025 hearing, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Commissioner Andrea Bolender described the case as “extremely disturbing” and “egregious” while setting cash bail at $100,000, WTMJ reported. The officer who shot Arner-Ortiz was a 35-year-old, eight-year veteran of the Milwaukee Police Department who was executing an arrest warrant for child sex crimes and was placed on administrative duty pending investigation, according to the station's later reporting. Under Milwaukee Police Department Standard Operating Procedure 575, video evidence of officer-involved incidents resulting in death or great bodily harm must be released publicly, and MPD released bodycam footage of the shooting roughly two weeks after it happened, per FOX6 News Milwaukee's earlier coverage.
Arner-Ortiz's case moved through the courts with several defense attorneys, and he had at one point planned to represent himself at trial, according to FOX6. When prosecutors first filed the five felony counts in January 2025, he faced a maximum combined penalty of more than 125 years in Wisconsin state prison. Under Wisconsin Statute § 948.02(2), second-degree sexual assault of a child under 16 is a Class C felony punishable by up to 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and the statute does not require proof of force. The computer-facilitation charge, under Wisconsin Statute § 948.075, carries the same maximum penalty for using a computerized communication system to reach someone believed to be under 16 to further a child sex crime, according to the Van Severen Law Office.
Case Fits a Statewide Surge in Online Exploitation Reports
The circumstances that led investigators to Arner-Ortiz echo a broader trend tracked across Wisconsin. The state's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received 19,767 CyberTips regarding suspected online child exploitation in 2025, a 323 percent increase from the 4,671 tips it logged in 2021, according to Urban Milwaukee. The task force now includes more than 340 affiliate agencies across the state.
Sentencing for Arner-Ortiz is set for next month. It remains unclear how much prison time he will ultimately receive or what supervision and sex offender registration requirements will be attached to his sentence, questions that will not be answered until that hearing, per FOX6's reporting.
