Two Hendersonville-area men are locked up on child exploitation charges after investigators searched their homes on back-to-back days this week. Jason Dennis Goings, 26, and Michael Kenyon Ferguson, 29, were each arrested without incident and booked into the Henderson County Detention Center, facing two counts of second-degree exploitation of a minor and two counts of third-degree exploitation of a minor apiece.
The searches took place Tuesday and Wednesday at two homes in the Hendersonville area, according to wlos.com. The Henderson County Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force led the effort, with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the Transylvania County Sheriff’s Office also executing the warrants. One of those searches targeted a home on Halsbury Avenue in Hendersonville, as reported by yahoo.com.
According to that same report, arrest warrants accuse Goings specifically of possessing and duplicating videos showing prepubescent children being subjected to sexual abuse. Under North Carolina General Statute, third-degree exploitation of a minor covers possessing child sexual abuse material showing a minor taking part in sexual activity, while second-degree exploitation covers recording, photographing, or distributing such material.
Investigation Remains Open, Officials Say
Deputies said the case is far from closed. Per the same wlos.com account, officials described the incidents as part of an ongoing investigation and said no additional information would be released at this time. That means key questions — including how the two men and the two searched properties are connected beyond the charges themselves — remain unanswered for now.
The arrests, which FOX Carolina News first reported occurred in Henderson County, add two more names to a growing list of child exploitation arrests across western North Carolina. Last October, Fox Carolina also reported on a Waynesville man arrested on 10 charges of child sex crimes, underscoring that these cases have been surfacing with regularity in the region.
A Statewide Surge in Reports
The Hendersonville arrests land amid a dramatic statewide rise in reported online child exploitation. Reports of online exploitation of children in North Carolina have increased by 1,115% since 2019, according to SBI data cited by wral.com. The average number of CyberTips the state receives jumped from 411 in 2019 to 4,382 in 2025, and the first three months of 2026 alone produced 12,169 CyberTips to the SBI.
That surge has outpaced staffing. The SBI has 18 sworn investigators dedicated to internet crimes against children, supported by five intelligence analysts — but two of those analyst positions are currently frozen due to a lack of funding, the WRAL investigation found. North Carolina’s federal ICAC grant has grown from about $450,000 in 2016 to just over $800,000 in 2025, though the increase has not kept pace with the explosion in case volume. Nationally, ICAC task forces conducted nearly 347,000 investigations in 2025 and made more than 17,000 offender arrests, according to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's description of the task force program.
