A 37-year-old elementary-school teacher in Queens was charged with distributing hundreds of sexual videos and images of minors, federal prosecutors in New York said on Thursday.
The teacher, Christopher Ward, was charged with possessing and distributing the content, some of which included children under 12, according to the criminal complaint.
It was unclear on Thursday whether those images and videos depicted any of the students Mr. Ward taught in New York.
Investigators said that Mr. Ward had disseminated the material for at least a year, beginning last summer. Mr. Ward is in federal custody and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
“Every day, Christopher Ward stood at the front of a classroom of first graders while allegedly storing hundreds of images exploiting children just like them,” Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
Mr. Ward has worked as a teacher in New York since at least January 2021, when he taught first graders at a school in Manhattan, prosecutors said. He left that school in June 2024. He began work at the school in Queens in September 2024. Prosecutors did not disclose the names of the schools.
The city’s Department of Education, which employed Mr. Ward, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges, the date when he was first employed by the department or his employment status. It was also unclear on Thursday whether Mr. Ward had worked as an educator before January 2021.
Last year, a company that operates a messaging application notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that, beginning in July 2024, a person had uploaded hundreds of images and other media files from an electronic device in New York State, the criminal complaint said. The complaint did not disclose the name of the company.
The person, whom investigators later identified as Mr. Ward, used different accounts to mask his identity, the complaint said. The shared files on those accounts included adults engaged in sexual activity with girls between 5 and 11 years old.
In a recorded conversation, a relative of Mr. Ward’s told authorities that Mr. Ward had admitted that he had received the pornographic videos and forwarded those files to others at least 30 different times, the complaint said. The relative recorded the conversation and gave the recording to authorities.
Investigators later discovered that on July 14, Mr. Ward had messaged with another person that he was attracted to several of his students, the complaint said, and provided details about their identities.
In a separate case, a teacher’s assistant employed by the Education Department was charged in July with possession of child sexual abuse material in the Eastern District of New York, according to another federal criminal complaint. The educator, Alejandro Santos, 47, had worked with children with mental disabilities, including children who were nonverbal.
Mr. Santos flew from the Dominican Republic to Kennedy Airport on July 15, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents saw Mr. Santos’s name had been flagged, the complaint said. The agents stopped Mr. Santos, asked for his phone, and discovered about 50 videos and images containing child sexual abuse material.
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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