URBANA, Ill. — An Illinois high school teacher, who is also a girls cross-country coach, was arrested Friday and charged with receiving, possessing and distributing child pornography.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Champaign County Sheriff’s Office, and Urbana Police Department are investigating the case.
Douglas O. Mynatt, 56, of Savoy, Illinois, is employed as a physical education teacher at Urbana’s University High School and serves as coach of the girls cross-country program.
The affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint alleges that on numerous dates in January 2020, Mynatt distributed, received and possessed images of child pornography including depictions of minor girls between six and nine years old.
According to the affidavit, Mynatt allegedly used Application A, an instant messaging application known for its feature that preserves users’ anonymity but logs IP addresses, to upload and share 15 digital files containing child pornography on five occasions in January 2020.
According to the affidavit, on March 20 the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office received a CyberTip referral made by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) division of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.
Application A self-reported to NCMEC that one of its online social media users possessed content believed to be images and movies of child pornography.
Application A reported several IP addresses for logins by the user, identified as Mynatt, including from his home address in Savoy, Illinois and at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
The News-Gazette reported: After Mynatt was taken to the sheriff’s office for questioning, investigator Dwayne Roelfs said he allegedly admitted to using a messaging app to send and receive child pornography in groups and private messages.
“Mynatt stated that he saves child-pornography files to the Photos application on his iPhone,” Roelfs wrote in the affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint filed Friday afternoon.
Agents have begun extracting data from his phone and have located 90 videos and 176,000 images, Roelfs said, “of which over half appear to depict child exploitation and child-erotica materials.”
Mynatt also allegedly stated that he had a “sexual relationship with two individuals who he met while they were his students,” Roelfs said, but “claimed that the individuals were over 18 and out of school when the sexual relationship occurred.”
If convicted, Mynatt faces penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
