A 43-year-old special education teacher from Mission, Texas, will serve 14 years in federal prison for coercion and enticement of a minor, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday.
Juan Carlos Munoz pleaded guilty March 29, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Alamdar S. Hamdani said in a news release from McAllen.
Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane sentenced Munoz to the prison sentence, which will be followed by five years of supervised release. During that time, he will have to comply with requirements restricting his access to children and the internet and must register as a sex offender.
“Mr. Munoz abused his position of public trust as a special education teacher to prey on those he was entrusted to protect,” Special Agent in Charge Craig Larrabee of Homeland Security Investigations said in the news release. “The sexual exploitation of children is among the most egregious crimes HSI investigates, and today’s sentencing serves as a reminder that our agency will work tirelessly to protect children from coercion and enticement of minors.”
The court heard Munoz solicited sexually explicit photos and videos from minor children and exchanged the photos with another adult male child predator.
“Munoz is a predator who hid within the walls of a local school and behind fake personas,” Hamdani said in the news release. “This sentence should show this family and all families that justice will bring child predators out of the shadows and placed behind bars where they belong.”
In November 2022, law enforcement in South Carolina met with a family who discovered their 14-year-old girl was communicating with a person soliciting nude photos and videos.
The girl met the person, who claimed to be a 19-year-old teenage boy, on a social media-video chat site. Law enforcement uncovered several conversations and traced the phone number to the Rio Grande Valley. They determined the suspect was Munoz, who at the time was a 41-year-old high school special education teacher, the news release said.
In December 2022, Texas authorities found Munoz at the school where he worked and he admitted communicating with about 50 children and requesting sexually explicit photos and videos.
He will remain in custody until he is transferred to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility.
HSI-Rio Grande Valley Child Exploitation Task Force investigated the case with help from the York County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Garcia prosecuted the case, which was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative the Department of Justice launched in May 2006 to fight child sexual exploitation and abuse.
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