Federal authorities arrested a Disney Cruise Line worker on two federal charges after they said he possessed child sexual abuse material, according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court on Monday.
Tirso Anthony Neri, 44, was identified in court documents as a crew member on the Disney Dream, based out of Port Everglades.
He is the third worker at the family-oriented cruise line to be arrested on federal child sexual abuse material charges in South Florida this year; fellow Phillippine nationals Alvin Gonzales, 49, and Amiel Trazo, 28, have also been indicted in U.S. District Court in separate cases.
According to a criminal complaint authored by Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Eric Stowers, the investigation into Neri began on Dec. 18, after the Disney Dream arrived at Port Everglades from the Bahamas.
The court documents state that HSI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents went to Neri’s cabin to conduct a border search of his two smartphones.
Authorities said they discovered “numerous sexually explicit photographs and videos of young children whose ages could not be definitively determined.”
Neri claimed in an interview that he is in several Telegram and Facebook Messenger chat groups where he downloads and buys adult pornography, according to the complaint.
When asked specifically about a folder containing content depicting a 17-year-old girl, Neri said he sometimes “obtains folders in the chat groups and saves them to his phone without looking at them and then deletes them after,” the complaint states.
It states that Neri told agents that regarding that specific folder, he must have “saved it to his phone without looking at it and had not deleted the folder.”
Stowers wrote that during a deeper examination, they found more child sexual abuse videos, including those depicting multiple girls, aged as young as 9, as well as a video of a boy, aged 10 to 12.
Neri, who was being held in the Broward Main Jail as of Tuesday morning, is facing counts of possession of child pornography and transportation of child pornography.
“In accordance with our zero-tolerance policy for this kind of alleged behavior, this individual is no longer with the company,” a DCL spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday.
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Source: Local10
