A Jefferson Parish jury has convicted former Terrytown photographer Joshua Sullivan, 46, on four counts of sexual battery of a child under 13, one count of producing child sexual abuse materials and three counts of possessing them. The case against Sullivan began with a single hospital visit in 2012 but didn't reach trial until this year, delayed for years by a backlog in processing digital evidence.
A Case That Took Over a Decade to Reach Trial
According to NOLA.com, the victims in the case are now adults who accused Sullivan of inappropriately touching them between 2010 and 2017, when they were between 7 and 13 years old. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office opened its investigation in October 2012 after a relative took a then-7-year-old girl to Ochsner Medical Center West Bank in unincorporated Gretna. That report accused Sullivan, who lived on East Niagara Circle in Terrytown, of touching the girl's genitals and photographing her while naked; the girl reportedly said Sullivan had done “nasty things” to her. A separate NOLA.com account described the girl in that initial 2012 report as 8 years old, a detail that conflicts with the age given in the paper's more recent coverage.
Detectives executed a search warrant at Sullivan's home and seized 14 devices tied to his photography business, including computers, cameras, cell phones and hard drives, the outlet's reporting states. The Sheriff's Office Digital Forensic Unit did not complete its search and extraction of the data on those devices until 2014 because of a backlog, and the resulting report sat unreviewed for years afterward.
Forensic Delay Left Evidence Unexamined for Years
The case didn't move again until 2018, when Detective Nick Vega was assigned to follow up after Sullivan requested the return of his equipment. Vega reviewed the previously unreviewed device data and, per the station's reporting, discovered more than 5,000 images containing evidence of child sexual abuse — though a separate account from the same outlet put the number at 6,997 images, a discrepancy that was not resolved in either report. The images reportedly included photos involving children as young as infants. Detectives determined that Sullivan himself had taken some of the explicit images and identified at least two victims within them.
Accounts differ on the exact size of the recovered data as well: one description put it at 2.4 terabytes, or the equivalent of about 850,000 photographs, while another described it as 2.4 terabytes and more than 850,000 photographs. Either way, the scale of material recovered from Sullivan's devices appears to have been a central factor in how long the case took to process. A federal watchdog report from the Government Accountability Office has identified gaps in forensic-analysis backlogs as a factor that can delay or hinder investigations into online child exploitation more broadly.
Arrest, New Charges and a Three-Day Trial
Vega obtained a warrant for Sullivan's arrest, and he was taken into custody in May 2018 at his home in Talladega, Alabama. Later that year, Sullivan pleaded not guilty to sexual battery of a victim under 13, production of child pornography involving a victim under 13, and two counts of possession of pornography involving children under 13. The case sat for years afterward until prosecutors added three more counts of sexual battery in 2024, after three additional victims came forward to report that Sullivan had touched them inappropriately as well.
Sullivan was ultimately convicted following a three-day trial before Judge June Berry Darensburg at the 24th Judicial District Court in Gretna. He is scheduled to be sentenced on October 21. Under Louisiana law, sexual battery of a victim under 13 committed by an offender 17 or older is punishable by 25 to 99 years of imprisonment at hard labor, according to the Louisiana State Legislature.
