A former Columbus high school teacher was sentenced to 240 months in prison Tuesday for crimes related to secretly recording explicit videos of students at his school and possessing child sexual abuse material.
Justin Foley, 48, of Delaware, was employed as a chemistry teacher at Columbus Alternative High School at the time of his offenses, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio, and pleaded guilty in May 2023 to sexually exploiting a minor and possessing child pornography.
The release reports that Foley used his cell phone and other digital media devices “in a hidden manner to capture the genitalia of his female students under their skirts and shorts during the school day.”
The office reported that in August 2022, the Delaware Police Department received CyberTip reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) regarding numerous images of apparent child sexual abuse material that were uploaded via Google email accounts. Investigators tracked the IP addresses for the reported email accounts to Foley, the office reported.
The office reports that during the investigation into Foley, officers discovered a second CyberTip report and found five of the IP addresses in the second report belonged to Columbus Public Schools.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office reports that Delaware County law enforcement officials executed a search warrant at Foley’s residence on Sept. 20, 2022 and detailed that Foley admitted to “creating videos in the classroom and hallways of the school at which he taught and that he had created some of these videos as recently as the previous week.”
“A review of Foley’s devices by the FBI revealed they contained numerous videos that were voyeuristic in nature and appear to have been self-produced,” the office said in a release. “The videos were recorded at the high school Foley worked at, local department stores in central Ohio, public areas of downtown Delaware, Ohio, and various dressing rooms at different unidentified locations. It is apparent from the videos that the victims depicted in them did not know they were being recorded.”
The release stated that Foley created numerous videos of female students in the hallways of Columbus Alternative High School or of females that were students in his classroom.
“In the videos he secretly recorded, Foley would hide his phone camera or place it beside or behind the victims in attempt to record up their skirts or shorts,” The office reported. “Foley then took screenshots from the content he filmed of his victims and created still images of the victim’s nude genitalia, zooming in and ‘lightening’ some of the screenshots to enhance the images.”
The office reported that in addition to the videos he personally created, authorities found more than 1,000 images of child sexual abuse material on Foley’s devices that depicted a series of images of prepubescent females in various stages of nudity, including fully nude and exposing themselves.
Foley was arrested and charged locally in Delaware County in September 2022. He was charged federally in November 2022. He was sentenced to 240 months in prison Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson.
He was in the Delaware County Jail Thursday awaiting transport to prison.
Kenneth L. Parker, United States attorney for the Southern District of Ohio; J. William Rivers, special agent in charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cincinnati Division; Westerville Police Chief Charles Chandler; Delaware Police Chief Adam Moore; Delaware County Prosecutor Melissa A. Schiffel; and other members of the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force announced the sentence Tuesday. Assistant United States attorneys Jennifer M. Rausch and Emily Czerniejewski represented the United States in this case.
Glenn Battishill can be reached at 740-413-0903.
