‘BAD TURKEY’

Florida Youth Pastor Charged With 408 Counts of Child Porn

Police say Shawn Fitzgerald, a high school teacher and coach, had hundreds of illegal images hidden on his cellphone.

Shawn Fitzgerald is a high-school teacher, a soccer and tennis coach, a youth pastor—and, cops say, “a bad turkey who is going to spend Thanksgiving in the county jail.” The 46-year-old Florida man was charged with 408 counts of possession of child pornography after investigators found sickening and exploitative images hidden on his cellphone in a “vault” disguised as a calculator app. And police anticipate more charges because they are not done examining all the material, the Lakeland Ledger reported.

“We saw horrific acts, and the acts were from children as young as 10-months-old that were engaged in some sort of illicit, horrible, conduct as a baby and all the way up to the early teens,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said on Saturday. Fitzgerald came under scrutiny from law enforcement after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children tipped them off about the upload of a video clip of a girl no older than 12 performing a sex act on an adult. Investigators are now trying to determine if any of the kids in the images live locally.