Convicted sex offender arrested on child-pornography charges
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IDAHO FALLS — A registered sex offender on probation for rape has been arrested for allegedly downloading more than 1,500 sexually explicit images and videos of children.
John Steven Castillo, 33, was arrested Nov. 30, and given a $100,000 bond after his parole officer discovered a cell phone in his possession with the child pornography on it. Castillo was charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a child.
He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on Dec. 15, in Bonneville County.
Castillo was on felony parole for a 2005 rape conviction when he was arrested and is a registered sex offender.
Documents show Castillo’s parole officer was making his rounds and stopped to check on Castillo at his place of work. There the parole officer found Castillo had a second smartphone he the officer not previously aware of.
The officer took the phone and found what he believed to be child pornography. An investigator from the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children Unit searched the phone thoroughly and found 2,200 sexually explicit images including 1,500 of which depicted prepubescent children.
The images were stored in a password protected applications such as Vaulty, an app specifically designed to hide pictures and Mega, a password protected cloud storage app, according to court documents.