TikTok, Instagram photos of colorful nails lead to Hialeah woman’s child porn charges
On her TikTok and Instagram accounts, Christina Marie Hernandez posted many photos and videos that depicted her colorful nail designs.
Those images, Hialeah police say, helped identify her as the same person who uploaded over a dozen child pornography files to the messaging app KIK.
Hernandez, 29, was arrested on Thursday and booked into a Miami-Dade jail on 13 counts of possessing child-porn images — a crime that is usually committed by men.
When she was arrested, Hernandez was confronted with the illegal videos and “she admitted to knowingly downloading and disseminating child pornography over the Internet.” She also admitted to “requesting specific” child porn from other Internet users, according to an arrest report.
She remained in jail on Thursday evening, and it was unclear if she had retained a defense attorney.
KIK is a free messaging app that includes chat rooms and has been used to trade child porn images in many cases in South Florida and across the country. Most recently, a Miami-Dade police officer was arrested in April for allegedly trading explicit images on KIK.
A cybertip led Hialeah police detectives late last year to focus on the KIK uploads and an IP address registered to Hernandez’s phone. According to the arrest report, the 13 videos depicted girls between the ages of 5 and 14 being sexually abused.
Police found that the KIK account registered to Hernandez featured the child porn images, as well as selfies of her and explicit photos that featured a woman’s distinct nail designs: white flowers with white petals and pink, blue, yellow and green lines, court records show. She is not accused of abusing any children or producing any of the images herself.
But to help strengthen the case that she actually controlled the KIK account, detectives turned to other social media to verify it was her account. On her TikTok account, which was public, they found her “very distinctive nail designs with different themes including diamonds.”
But her Instagram was private. Based in part on the TikTok evidence, a search warrant was issued to gain access to her Instagram account — which ultimately showed many of the same selfies found on the KIK account, records show. The Instagram account also featured two images of the distinctive nail designs found on the KIK account, which were “co-mingled with child pornography,” according to records.
Those distinct nail photos were uploaded “within the same time frame” as the child porn uploads, police say.
She was arrested Thursday at her home in Hialeah, according to an arrest report by Detective George Otero.
