Former Dallas high school teacher sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on child pornography convictions

DALLAS - A former local high school teacher was sentenced on Wednesday to 10 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty in September 2010 to three counts of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. This sentence was announced by U.S. Attorney James T. Jacks of the Northern District of Texas. This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

In addition, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade ordered that Jon Leslie Lyons, 45, will not be given credit for time served. After Lyons completes his prison sentence, he must register as a sex offender, and must serve a lifetime of supervised release. Lyons has been in custody since his arrest in June 2010.

According to documents filed in the case, in May 2010, a Dallas Independent School District (DISD) employee notified ICE HSI possible child pornography was discovered on a DISD computer assigned to Lyons. At the time, Lyons was an English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas.

Soon thereafter, an ICE HSI special agent met with the DISD employee who made the referral and viewed images of prepubescent females posing in lewd and lascivious manners that had been recently forensically recovered from Lyon's work computer. Several ICE HSI special agents then met Lyons at his apartment in Dallas, near the school, and conducted a consensual interview. In that interview Lyons admitted he had images of 13- to 16-year-old nude teens, as well as images of prepubescent females, engaged in sexually explicit conduct on his home desktop computer and Apple iPhone. He also stated that he had downloaded child pornography from the Internet to his iPhone as recently as the previous day.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa J. Miller, Northern District of Texas, prosecuted this case.

This investigation was part of Operation Predator, a nationwide ICE initiative to protect children from sexual predators, including those who travel overseas for sex with minors, Internet child pornographers, criminal alien sex offenders, and child sex traffickers.

ICE encourages the public to report suspected child predators and any suspicious activity through its toll-free hotline at 1-866-DHS-2ICE. This hotline is staffed around the clock by investigators.

Suspected child sexual exploitation or missing children may be reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an Operation Predator partner, at 1-800-843-5678 or http://www.cybertipline.com.