A 37-year-old Mount Airy man has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for sexually exploiting three young girls and possessing child sexual abuse material, after investigators say he used a cellphone to produce explicit images and hid a camera inside his bathroom. U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar handed down the sentence to Mark Travis Brigham, who will also face a lifetime of federal supervision once he is eventually released.
According to The MoCo Show, Brigham pleaded guilty to the charges in June 2026 before facing sentencing. Court filings released by federal prosecutors establish that his coerced exploitation of the three minor victims, who were between 13 and 14 years old, spanned from September 2023 through August 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. A federal grand jury in Baltimore had returned an indictment on December 10, 2025, charging Brigham with seven counts of sexual exploitation of a child and one count of possession of child sexual abuse material under case docket JKB-25-0382.
Hidden Camera and a House Full of Firearms
Investigators say Brigham used a cellphone to produce multiple images of the exploitation and also placed a hidden camera in a bathroom, where he secretly recorded both adults and minors, per the same account. During the August 6, 2025 search warrant execution at his Mount Airy residence, law enforcement seized a tablet, a digital camera with an SD card, two cellphones, 35 firearms, ammunition, and a magazine, the Justice Department's release states.
Forensic examination of the seized electronics is what ultimately uncovered the child sexual abuse material that formed the basis of the possession charge, the station's report notes. The large cache of firearms recovered from the home has not been tied in available records to any separate firearms charges or forfeiture action, and that detail remains unaddressed in the case materials reviewed.
A Joint Investigation Under Project Safe Childhood
The case was built through a joint investigation by Homeland Security Investigations Maryland, the Frederick County Sheriff's Office, and the Frederick County State's Attorney's Office, led by Sheriff Charles A. Jenkins and State's Attorney J. Charles Smith III, according to the Justice Department. The prosecution fell under the Department of Justice's Project Safe Childhood initiative, a nationwide effort launched in May 2006 to marshal federal, state, and local resources against child sexual exploitation and to rescue victims.
Because Brigham was convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 2251, which governs sexual exploitation of a minor to produce child sexual abuse material, he faced a statutory mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years per count. Federal inmates sentenced under that statute are also statutorily barred from earning early-release time credits under the First Step Act, per the Federal Bureau of Prisons, meaning Brigham is expected to serve the overwhelming majority of his 300-month sentence before his lifetime supervised release begins.
A Separate State-Level Case in Mount Airy This Year
Mount Airy, a town spanning Frederick and Carroll counties roughly 40 miles west of Baltimore with about 9,900 residents and a median household income exceeding $150,000, has now seen two child exploitation prosecutions surface from the same county in recent months. In August 2026, a separate Frederick County investigation led to state-level child pornography charges against another 66-year-old Mount Airy resident, as Hoodline previously reported.
That earlier case also originated from a Frederick County Sheriff's Office investigation, underscoring what the research shows is a concentrated local law enforcement effort against child exploitation across rural and suburban Maryland. Brigham will begin a term of lifetime supervised release once his prison sentence concludes.
