Benson man jailed on 6 new child pornography charges, allegedly continued to view images after being charged with 13 felonies related to child porn

Mar. 16—BENSON — Already facing 13 felony child pornography charges, a Benson man is in jail, facing six more felonies for allegedly disseminating child pornography.

Matthiew John Graue, 26, had been on supervised release without paying bail since late last year and was ordered to possess no pornographic materials or electronics.

Now, the Swift County District Court has ordered him held in jail on $100,000 bail for release without conditions. The new release order does not offer an option for supervised release.

Graue is considered a registered predatory offender for a previous conviction in Iowa.

Graue was arrested earlier this month after the Swift County Attorney's Office applied for an arrest warrant, alleging that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had detected suspected child pornography videos uploaded to a Kik account, a social media platform, in January.

The BCA used subpoenas to tie the videos to Graue, according to court records.

The six videos described in the criminal complaint include descriptions of scenes of sex acts involving prepubescent girls.

In one, a naked adult male was allegedly engaged in intercourse with a female child. In another, a young teenage girl was engaged in a sex act with a girl approximately 5 years old. Another showed a female child having oral sex with an adult male

According to the complaint, officers used a search warrant March 3 to look for electronic devices at Graue's home. During the search Graue allegedly admitted an iPhone found under the couch where he slept would contain child pornography.

In charges filed in late 2020, Graue was accused of 13 felonies in four separate court files.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension contacted the Benson Police Department in September 2020 for assistance in investigating downloaded images of pornographic works involving minors.

A subpoena was served on the internet provider for information about the subscriber, who was a relative of Graue.

Benson police officers and BCA agents executed a search warrant Sept. 21 at the relative's home where Graue was living.

They allegedly found images in a hidden folder on his phone, and submitted 130 photos and videos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be compared to the center's database.

The center recognized children in three videos. In each video, a young girl, one estimated to be 6-10 years old and two estimated to be 8-12 years old, are being raped by adult men.

Other images were of children who were not recognized by the center. The children in the images ranged from infancy to approximately 13 years of age.

Several images had been downloaded from SnapChat and were flagged by the Internet Crimes Against Children data system.

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