The Hall County Sheriff's Office said Friday that a 39-year-old Clermont man arrested last month for distributing child sex abuse material is now facing more charges.
Harley Herschel Payne, Jr. was initially arrested on June 2, 2022. The arrest followed an investigation by the Sheriff's Office, which determined that Payne had uploaded 15 videos and 11 sexually explicit images of children to three different cloud storage accounts.
"These offenses actually occurred starting in the Fall between the end of November and then the end of January of this year," said Hall County Sheriff's Office Spokeswoman B.J. Williams.
Investigators then charged Payne with four counts of sexual exploitation of children.
"The investigation continued, and our investigator determined that Payne had downloaded dozens more images of child pornography to his cell phone; that offense happened on February 1 of this year," Williams explained. "This discovery led to one more warrant which was issued this week for sexual exploitation of children."
Williams told AccessWDUN that it does not appear that any of the images were of local children. Payne remains jailed in Hall County.
