Ex-Jacksonville teacher Thomas Hazouri Jr., son of late mayor, sentenced in child porn case

A former Mayport Elementary School teacher and son of a past mayor was sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty in August to distributing child sexual abuse videos over the internet, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Thomas Lester Hazouri Jr., 42, was sentenced to seven years and three months behind bars. He also must serve a 15-year term of supervised release, register as a sex offender and pay child victims $18,000 in restitution, Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan ruled Wednesday.

Hazouri was initially arrested on Aug. 19, 2020, by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office on 25 counts of possession of child pornography, jail records show. Along with photographs of "child erotica or age-difficult pornography," his arrest warrant says "non-exploitive pictures of children" were found that were apparently taken in the Mayport school classroom while Hazouri taught there.

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All 25 state counts were dropped after Hazouri was re-arrested on Sept. 4 on a federal charge of distributing child sexual abuse videos, prosecutors said.

An online social media messaging app notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that one of its users, identified later as Hazouri, had uploaded and distributed videos depicting children being sexually abused. The videos were uploaded on March 26, 2020, in an online public chat with 46 other users, according to court documents.

Further investigation by the Sheriff’s Office traced the upload to Hazouri’s residence. At that time, the son of late Mayor Tommy Hazouri was a second-grade teacher at Mayport Elementary, prosecutors said.

Search warrants checked the app account used by Hazouri as well as an email account and uncovered nine images and 45 videos depicting minor children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

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An Aug. 6, 2020, search of his house by the Sheriff's Office seized Hazouri’s iPhone and other computer equipment. A forensic examination of the iPhone revealed 123 images and three videos depicting child sexual abuse, seven of them showing either an infant or a toddler, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

dscanlan@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4549

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Son of former Jacksonville mayor sentenced for child sex videos