Sex offender, fired Jags employee gets 220 years

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A convicted child molester has been sentenced to 220 years in federal prison for producing child sexual abuse material and hacking the jumbotron at the Jacksonville Jaguars stadium after the team learned he was a registered sex offender and fired him.

A federal judge in Jacksonville sentenced Samuel Arthur Thompson, of St. Augustine, on Monday, according to court records. He was convicted in November of producing, receiving and possessing sexual images of children, producing such images while required to register as a sex offender, violating the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, sending unauthorized damaging commands to a protected computer and possessing a firearm as a convicted felon.

Thompson, 53, was arrested in early 2020 after being deported by the Philippines back to the U.S., officials said. He had fled to the Southeast Asian country about six months earlier, after the FBI executed a search warrant at his home and seized several of his computers, according to a criminal complaint.

According to court records, Thompson was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Alabama in 1998. Among other things, the conviction required him to register as a sex offender and to report any international travel.

The Jaguars hired Thompson as a contractor in 2013 to consult on the design and installation of their new video board network and later to operate the jumbotron on game days, investigators said. The team chose not to renew his contract in 2018 after learning of his conviction and status as a sex offender.

According to prosecutors, before Thompson’s contract ended in March 2018, he installed remote access software on a spare server in the Jaguars’ server room. He then remotely accessed computers controlling the jumbotron during three games in the 2018 season, causing the video boards to malfunction repeatedly.

The Jaguars eventually found the spare server and removed its access to the jumbotron, prosecutors said. The next time the server was accessed during a game, the team was able to collect network information about the intruder, which the FBI traced to Thompson’s home, prosecutors said.

The FBI executed a search warrant at Thompson’s residence in July 2019 and seized a phone, a tablet and two laptops, which all had been used to access the spare jumbotron server, according to log files. Agents also said they seized a firearm, which Thompson was prohibited from possessing as a convicted felon.

The FBI also found thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse on the devices. The files included videos and images that Thompson had produced a month before the raid on his home that depicted children who had been in his care and custody, investigators said.

The Jaguars released a statement in November, following Thompson’s conviction, thanking federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for their work on the case.