A Florida firefighter was thrown into jail for allegedly sharing sleazy photos of underage girls on Twitter.
Cops arrested 38-year-old Gabriel Diaz Thursday on 16 counts of promoting the sexual performance of a minor.
The father of two has served Miami-Dade’s Fire Department for 17 years. He is currently on paid administrative leave, pending the outcome of the case.
Diaz swears he had no idea the girls in the photos were minors, the Miami Herald reports.
The man had been using the handle “ot_a_ku2” on Twitter to chat with his buddies. The social media website flagged several of Diaz’s posts that looked like they could contain child porn. Twitter sent these images to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Investigators determined that at least seven of the girls in the photos were child victims who were already on their radar. Two of those victims were involved in “sexual conduct.”
Cops then pored through Diaz’s Twitter account and found that he had shared at least 16 images of young girls having sex.
In December, law enforcement personnel raided Diaz’s home and work office, seizing his computers.
Investigators discovered that he did most of his illegal sharing at work.
Before the raid, Diaz had been working for the fire department’s Public Education Unit, CBS reports. For that job, the man would travel to schools in the area to give fire safety presentations to children.
He was reassigned to desk work until his arrest on Thursday.
Diaz’s lawyer, Gus Lage, called his client a “wonderful family man.”
“He looks forward to proving that he was in no way knowingly involved in child pornography,” Lage said.
But Judge Diana Gonzalez-Whyte wasn’t buying it.
“Some of these children appear to be under the age of even 12 years old and there’s significant detail as to what was going on in these,” the judge said in court.
She set Diaz’s bond at $160,000, Local10 reports.
YouTube and Facebook have explicit bans on sharing child pornography. Twitter, on the other hand, bans pornographic images in users’ profile photo, header photo, and background. Last year, the company began filtering its content for child pornography using Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology.
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