An 18-year-old high school football star has been forced to register a sex offender for the next 25 years after he shared a sex video he made with a 14-year-old girl.
Jeremiah Horton was one of four teens prosecuted in connection with the explicit video but he was the only one charged in adult court. Horton was charged after he secretly recorded himself having sex with a 14-year-old girl and then sent the video to classmates.
The incident occurred in September 2018, just one month after the teen turned 18. At his sentencing last month in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, Judge Patrick Dinkelacker also ordered Horton to spend six months at the River City Correctional Center, a local prison alternative for nonviolent offenders.
Horton apologized to the victim and her family in court last month, WKRC reports.
“I’m not proud of what I did,” Horton said, adding that he was also sorry for the humiliation he caused his father, who has raised him alone as a single parent.
His attorney, Carl Lewis, called the crime a “youthful indiscretion.”
“I doubt very seriously you’ll ever see this young man again in the criminal justice system,” Lewis told Dinkelacker.
In April, Horton pleaded guilty to a felony child pornography charge, a move that required him to register as a Tier 2 sex offender. He was expelled from North College Hill High School after the video surfaced last September. The mother of the 14-year-old girl went to police in October 2018 after she caught wind of the video.
Three other students who shared the video were prosecuted in juvenile court. One of the boys, who was 14, received the video on his cellphone and then sent it as a group text message to eight others, according to court documents obtained by The Enquirer.
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