Porn Busters Return!

Javier Perez

It's been roughly two years since Javier Perez was released from federal prison, after serving out a nearly five-year sentence for possession of child pornography. Perez has always claimed he didn't send the child pornography that led to the federal investigation that put him in jail. And now the man who was the actual target of that investigation has himself been arrested in Austin and charged with recording an Internet video of a young girl being sexually assaulted. "It's so horrible," says Perez, who now lives and works with his family outside of Austin. "It's been a roller coaster of emotions." (For more on the case, see "Porn Busters," Aug. 17, 2007.)

Perez was arrested after FBI agents raided his home in June 2004. They'd targeted Perez based entirely on the fact that his name appeared on a bill for a Time Warner Cable Internet account. The investigators had gotten a tip from a woman in upstate New York that she'd received videos of young girls engaged in sexual activity from a man she'd been chatting with in a Yahoo! chat room, a man who was using the screen name "famcple." Contacted by the FBI, Yahoo! told investigators that "famcple" was the name used by a "Mr. Rob Ram."

As it turned out, Perez shared his Oak Hill home with two roommates, one of whom was named Robert Ramos. All three of the roommates' computers were hard-wired into the Time Warner modem via ethernet lines. But when police raided Perez's home, they either weren't interested in searching Ramos' room and computers or they simply didn't make the connection between the two names. The feds eventually found images of what they said was child pornography on several computer discs among hundreds of stored discs that contained information that Perez, with a history of compulsive tendencies, had downloaded from the Internet without reviewing. (What those images in fact might have been is unknown; any evidence deemed to depict child pornography is not available for public inspection.) Perez maintained that he never meant to download any pornography and says he never did any online chatting. Simply put, he said, the FBI targeted the wrong man and allowed their 2004 perpetrator to remain at large.

Now Ramos has been arrested in Austin and charged with child pornography and having solicited underage girls to send naked photos of themselves to him via a fake Facebook page he set up. In a statement to the FBI, Ramos admitted to soliciting females on the social networking site but denied ever committing any child abuse. "I have never had sexual contact with a minor and I am not a threat to anyone," reads a transcript of the statement filed in an FBI affidavit with the federal court. "What I have done was stupid and not worth anything. I am very sorry and have made some terrible mistakes."

The fact that Ramos has been arrested for doing the same things he was allegedly doing back in 2004 is cold comfort to Perez, who ultimately pleaded guilty to possession of child porn. He says it's "horrible" what Ramos has been doing, and that the FBI failed to realize it was Ramos who they were looking for back in 2004 when they could have stopped him. He said that at the time of the raid on Perez's home on Scenic Brook Drive, Ramos told Perez that he felt that "you took a bullet for me," Perez recalled this week.

Perez said he's spent nearly eight years trying to "figure out how to get this fixed" and how to clear his name, and he wonders now if there might be a chance at vindication. "I still feel very strongly that this was an illegal search" of his property and computer, he says. "I thought he'd never get caught."