Clay County man sentenced for attempting to entice a child to produce sexually explicit videos

U.S District Judge Marcia Morales Howard has sentenced 32-year-old Garrett Eric Weber of Green Cove Springs to 20 years and 5 months in federal prison for attempting to entice a 9-year-old child to produce pornography.

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Weber was also ordered to serve a 12-year term of supervised release, register as a sex offender and pay $45,500 in restitution to several child victims. Weber was arrested on a federal warrant by the Green Cove Springs Police Department during a traffic stop on July 2, 2021, and he has been detained since that time. Weber had pleaded guilty on July 27, 2022.

According to court documents, in 2020, Weber, using the name “BUBBLESXD_90,” uploaded a video depicting the sexual abuse of a child to a public chat room on a popular social media app. This upload was subsequently detected by law enforcement officers in Wisconsin.

Further investigation by the FBI ultimately resulted in the identification of Weber. In March 2021, an undercover FBI agent, posing as the parent of a young child, engaged in online conversation with Weber using the same app. After some discussion and being told that the “child” was only 9 years old, Weber offered to serve as the “child’s” trainer by engaging in sexual activity with the “child.”

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Weber requested that the “parent” take a pornographic photo of the “child” for him and provided specific instructions on how to accomplish this. Weber said that he wanted the “parent” to film him as he sexually abused the “child” and said that the resulting video recording “would be the best child pornography vid ever.”

Weber sent the “parent” several videos over the internet that depicted the sexual abuse of young children in order to demonstrate exactly how he planned to molest the “child” in person.

After his arrest on July 2, 2021, Weber admitted that he was in fact “BUBBLESXD_90,” that he had engaged in “horrible” online conversations with the “child’s” parent and that he had distributed videos of very young children being sexually abused using the Internet. Weber acknowledged that the “violence is staggeringly harsh against him” and that what he did was “criminal.”

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This case was investigated by Green Cove Springs PD, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Winnebago County (Wisconsin) Sheriff’s Office, Clay County Sheriff’s Office, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and Federal Bureau of Investigation in Milwaukee and Jacksonville. It was prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorney D. Rodney Brown.

This is another case brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children and to identify and rescue victims.

For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.

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