A U.S. district judge sentenced a 36-year-old Leesburg man to 29 years in federal prison this week after he admitted to using fake online personas to manipulate children into sexually explicit conduct and then uploading the footage to the internet. Wesley Jacob Hearon pleaded guilty to a federal charge of production of child pornography, closing out a case that stretched from social media chat platforms into a federal courtroom in Marshall.
Guilty Plea Before Federal Judge
Hearon entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap at the Sam B. Hall Jr. Federal Building and United States Courthouse, according to KLTV. Prosecutors say Hearon used online personas on social media to coerce minor victims into sexually explicit conduct, then uploaded visual depictions of those acts to the internet. The 29-year sentence was confirmed by the station, though a Department of Justice search listing separately describes the term as 348 months, a figure that could not be independently confirmed through the stronger source.
Court records reviewed by the same station indicate Hearon used social media chat platforms specifically to get minor victims to participate in sexually explicit conduct, and that he recorded videos of that conduct before posting images online.
Part of a National Enforcement Push
The station reports that Hearon's case falls under Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide Justice Department initiative launched in 2006 to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse. The federal statute under which Hearon was charged, 18 U.S.C. § 2251, covers specified conduct involving minors to produce or transmit visual depictions and certain related offenses, according to the U.S. House Office of the Law Revision Counsel.
Hearon's case lands amid what child-safety advocates describe as a worsening landscape online. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says reports of online enticement, including sextortion, continue to rise, with the organization receiving 1.4 million reports of online exploitation in 2025, per the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Separately, the FBI has warned that criminals are illegally accessing underage victims' social media and personal accounts to steal and sell explicit content, including non-consensual intimate images, on criminal marketplaces, according to a public service announcement from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Other Cases Across Texas
Hearon's sentence follows a string of similar prosecutions across the state. In Midland, a Texas man was sentenced to 420 months in federal prison on eight counts tied to producing and distributing child sexual abuse material, the FBI's El Paso field office announced. In College Station, a 26-year-old man was ordered to federal prison this past July for soliciting sex from a minor after communicating with the victim through social media, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas.
No further details about victim identities, platform names, or additional agencies involved in the Hearon investigation have been confirmed. As is standard in federal child exploitation cases prosecuted under Project Safe Childhood, the sentence is meant to serve both as punishment and as a deterrent against the kind of online coercion that led to Hearon's conviction.
