The Barry University law professor arrested this week had hundreds, and possibly thousands, of pornographic photos and videos of children on his hard drive, according to the affidavit for his arrest released Thursday.
The disturbing images involved infants, toddlers and school-age children naked and engaged in sex acts with adults, the document said. In some, the kids were bound and gagged while they were sexually abused.
Glen-Peter Ahlers, 70, has worked at Barry’s law campus in Orlando since 2002, according to his curriculum vitae. He was put on leave after his arrest Tuesday, the university said.
Initially jailed, Ahlers posted bond and was no longer listed as an inmate at the Orange County Jail on Thursday afternoon. His bond had been set at $100,000. He has not yet entered a plea, according to Orange County court records.
Cloud-storage company Dropbox started the investigation in October when it alerted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about child porn images found in Ahlers’ account, the affidavit said. The center then alerted the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
Detectives searched Ahlers’ Dropbox account, which was attached to a network known to be used for “nefarious criminal activity on the Internet to include producing, sharing, and downloading child sexual abuse material,” the 17-page affidavit said.
They found 47 images, all of which depicted a school-age girl performing sex acts with an adult male, it said. Detectives also found photos of Ahlers’ drivers license, passport, course curriculum and selfie-style pictures of him on the account, it said.
“The entire contents of the Dropbox were organized meticulously in different folders,” a detective wrote.
After obtaining search warrants, officers conducted forensic investigations of a computer and hard drive found at his Orlando home. They also searched for devices at his university office.
On the hard drive, they found “hundreds or thousands of images and videos” depicting the molestation and sexual battery of babies and young children, the document said.
On Feb. 3, sheriff’s investigators stopped Ahlers while he was driving near Colonial Drive. He was told about the search warrants that were to be executed and was taken to be questioned.
He told detectives that it was “just curiosity” that attracted him to child pornography, calling it his “own private embarrassment.”
Ahlers told investigators he had “cleared out” his hard drives because he was getting married and said he had not looked at the images since getting married. They would later find the images on a hard drive kept in his home office, however.
In an interview with detectives, Ahlers’ wife said she was not surprised by the allegations, noting that she had caught him “looking at young teenage girls in public” before, the affidavit said.
On Ahlers phone, investigators also found four images of a young woman they thought looked to be a student at Barry University. The photos were zoomed into the student’s groin, “attempting to photograph her genitals,” according to the document.
Ahlers’ attorney, Matthew Ferry, could not be immediately reached for comment.