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A former Maryville truck driver died from a gunshot wound suffered during an FBI attempt to serve a warrant at a New Market residence Wednesday morning.
Scott Edward Evans was part of an international pornography-sharing network that allegedly trafficked in child porn and photographs depicting bestiality and child bondage, according to the FBI.
The details of Evans’ death remained unclear this morning, but what’s more certain is that FBI agents were executing a porn-related search warrant at a Stapleton Road trailer-home when Evans died, according to a FBI spokeswoman.
U.S. Magistrate Dennis H. Inman issued the search warrant based on a criminal complaint filed by FBI Agent Bianca L. Pearson. The FBI agent planned to charge Evans with receiving and distributing pornography.
The complaint and an accompanying application for a search warrant detail part of what Pearson learned about Evans’ alleged porn-sharing activities and suggest possible motives for people like Evans who are involved in the illicit trade.
Evans was associated with a man in Australia who was a conduit for “dozens” of pornography traffickers that encountered each other on Craigslist, according Pearson.
“Most of these (e-mail) conversations were sexually explicit and included images depicting adult heterosexual pornography, adult homosexual pornography, transsexual pornography, bestiality, (child pornography) and child erotica of prepubescent males and females,” the criminal complaint states.
The Australian case was a spinoff from a porn investigation that originated in Germany that went worldwide through Interpol, an international law enforcement agency.
The criminal complaint indicates that three unidentified people lived at the Stapleton Road residence with Evans.
The FBI initially indicated it was searching for two people related to child porn which contained clues that led investigators to New Market.
It’s unclear whether Evans was one of the two white males the FBI was looking for in the case.
This morning, FBI Agent Kelly Kindness declined to provide additional details about other possible suspects or new developments in the investigation.
Pearson described one of the photographs Evans allegedly possessed as a “prepubescent female with her genitals and chest exposed … tied at the ankles with a white rope and her hands are behind her back.”
The break in the case came in Queensland, Australia in March 2012 when the prolific child-porn trafficker was charged, according to the FBI agent. Evans was linked with more than one of the 111 United States e-mail accounts identified on the Australian suspect’s computer.
The Australian possessed “hundreds of thousands” of pornographic images, a profile the FBI maintains meshes well with the East Tennessee criminal investigation.
Once obtained, photographs depicting child pornography are seldom discarded because their held as “prized possessions,” according to Pearson.
“These people use sexually explicit images of minors as a means of reliving fantasies or actual sexual encounters,” the application for the search warrant states.
“They also use the images as keepsakes and as a means of gaining acceptance, status, trust and psychological support by exchanging, trading or selling the images to other people with similar interests,” the document further states.
-By Robert Moore, Tribune Staff Writer
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