Story by Brad McElhinny
Prosecutors have called a former Kanawha County school counselor “a sexual predator of the most egregious variety” even as a scheduled sentencing was delayed.
Federal prosecutors have asked for a 35-year sentence for former counselor Todd Roatsey in a memorandum filed in U.S. District Court for Southern West Virginia.
Todd Christopher Roatsey, 43, of Elkview has pleaded guilty to charges of attempted production of child pornography and attempted enticement of a minor. Prior to the guilty plea, Roatsey had faced 13 charges. Roatsey worked at Pinch Elementary School from August 2012 to last November.
The sentencing had been scheduled to take place today. But during a telephone conference this week, a judge agreed more time is necessary to finalize restitutio9n for victims. So the new sentencing date is 1:30 p.m. Dec. 19.
“Defendant has spent his entire adult life engaged in the sexual abuse and exploitation of children,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Starting in his early twenties and continuing through his arrest in this case two decades later, defendant has engaged in nearly every type of sexual abuse that exists.”
Prosecutors allege that he:
- Sexually abused at least two children between the ages of 11 and 13 in the early 2000s by repeatedly having sexual intercourse with them while he was an adult working as a lifeguard at a swimming pool, where he met them;
- Pretended to be a teenage boy on Snapchat in order to produce child pornography of at least two minors;
- Pretended to be a teenage boy on Snapchat in order to engage in sexually inappropriate conversations with elementary school students he knew through his employment at Pinch Elementary;
- Communicated with other pedophiles online to exchange images and videos of the sexual abuse of children as young as infants and toddlers;
- Collected child sexual abuse materials depicting the sexual abuse of children, including infants and toddlers, both on his own computer equipment and on secure online file storage platforms;
- Participated in online teen dating groups while pretending to be a teenager in order to communicate with underage girls and direct them to his Snapchat account;
- Participated in online chat groups dedicated to encouraging incest;
- Commented on posts on online chat forums to encourage sexual activity between adults and minors;
- Encouraged minors online to send him images of their breasts;
- Recorded inappropriate videos of students at his school; and
- Masturbated to images of students from his school.
Prosecutors point out that is only a list of what is known. Given low rates of reporting by victims and methods used by the defendant to cover his online trail, “this is likely an incomplete picture of the totality of defendant’s exploitation of children over the last twenty years.”
From the earliest days of his employment in the school system, his role as a counselor “gave him the direct ability to identify vulnerable children based upon his knowledge of their home situations and mental health.”
Prosecutors contend “his sentence must reflect the substantial harm that he has done to so many children in such a wide variety of ways over such a long period of time.”