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Fraley has pleaded not guilty to all charges. The hearing was scheduled for today in front of Butler County Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Oster Jr., but it was continued until May 29 due to coronavirus concerns.
Fraley is free on $500,000 bond and is fitted with a GPS monitor. As part of bond, Oster also ordered Fraley to have no contact with any children, including his own, to have no internet access and to report twice per week to pretrial services.
Last month, attorney Chris Pagan filed a motion to suppress evidence taken from a Crawford Street home, cell phone, computers and other electronic devices.
Pagan argued some of the search warrants were not properly signed by the magistrate and relied on an uncorroborated statement from a woman with a drug addiction and a case through Butler County Children Services.
“(The woman) told agents that Fraley resided at (the Crawford Street residence) and she identified her child as present in pornographic images presented on Fraley’s Google account. There is no corroboration of (the woman’s) statement and she is not identified in the affidavit as reliable,” Pagan wrote in the motion.
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“Further, the affidavit fails to provide information, known to county agents, that (the woman) had a drug addiction that caused (children services) to remove the children from her custody and that her motive to shift blame potentially undermined her reliability.”
In response, Assistant Prosecutor Kelly Heile said the woman is a citizen eyewitness who had custody of her children at the time she identified her child in one of the pornographic images.
“The (officer) specifically identified (the woman) as the person providing detailed information which identified the alleged child-victim, provided specific information related to that identification, and specific information regarding defendant’s residence history and basis for that knowledge. Detectives at no time had any reason to believe that information as anything but true. While the BCSO may have been aware of Children’s Services involved with (the woman), at the time of their contact with and interview of (the woman), she had full custody of her children.”
Heile also pointed out in the court document that the images in the BCSO possession at the time were of a male and a child, not a female. “Therefore BCSO would have known no reason for (the woman) to have shifted blame ….”
A computer believed to belong to Fraley contained “a very large amount of child pornography — over 1,200 videos depicting children engaged in sexual activity, much of which has been duplicated by defendant’s backing up the videos from his phone to his computer. The most recent unidentified backup occurred on Oct. 29,” said Heile in court documents.
The some of the images allegedly traced to Fraley’s digital payment service include sex acts involving toddler-aged children. One of the images may have been taken at a previous residence shared by a witness and Fraley, according to Heile.
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