Two Alabama men kept a 9-year-old boy captive for months as they sexually tortured him and filmed it as part of a larger child porn ring, prosecutors in Huntsville say in a disturbing case.
So disturbing were the more than 100 photographs police found that officers could not even positively identify the boy because they could not bear to look, cops said in court on Monday, AL.com reports.
Charles Dunnavant is charged with sexual torture, sodomy, aggravated child abuse and exposing a person to an STD.
Carl Philip Herold, the boy’s father, is charged with sodomy, sexual abuse, aggravated child abuse, child pornography production, distributing child pornography and with allowing his child to be depicted in pornography.
“He has the means of travel, family out of state and some of the allegations are there was much travel in the lives of Dunnavant and Herold,” Madison County Assistant District Attorney Gabrielle Helix said at a bond hearing Monday. “They held the child captive for eight months and there are no standards, taboos or lines this defendant and his co-defendant hesitated to cross.”
Evidence shows the men took the child across state lines for “criminal sexual purposes,” AL.com reported.
Herold has a computer programming background and runs a popular YouTube channel where he livestreams programming lessons. Prosecutors say his son was not enrolled in school in Huntsville and that they think he was kept in the home without interaction with the outside world.
Dunnavant, who grew up near the northern Alabama and southern Tennessee border, was arrested at a family member’s home in Tennessee.
Prosecutors have requested $1 million bond for both men.
