A 32-year-old Summit Township man was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation after pleading guilty to having child pornography.

James Richard Schmidt pleaded guilty Dec. 3 to one felony count of child pornography. Police originally charged him in 2019 with 101 separate counts related to child pornography, but the charges were eventually consolidated to one.

As part of Schmidt's sentence, Judge Timothy McCune ordered that Schmidt must spend the first six months on house arrest with electronic monitoring.

A trooper with the Northwest Computer Crime Task Force launched the investigation in 2018 after police received a Cyber Tipline report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The tip claimed that someone had uploaded child pornography onto Google Drive. Police traced the internet subscriber information to a home on Standard Avenue in Butler.

Troopers subsequently obtained a search warrant for the apartment, where Schmidt was living at the time. The warrant was served March 28, 2018, when Schmidt was not home. Police seized two laptop computers and a thumb drive.

Schmidt later agreed to talk to investigators without an attorney, police said.

During the interview, documents said, he recounted meeting a person on Craigslist, who explained “how to search and find child pornography on the (i)nternet using the dark Web.”

The so-called “dark Web” is a hidden part of the internet that can only be accessed using special software.

Police said Schmidt admitted that he possessed about eight gigabytes worth of child pornography on the thumb drive that was connected to one of his computers taken during the search.

He identified the software operating system and the anonymous online search program he used, documents said, and provided investigators with his password to access his files.

In a hidden folder, police said, were numerous images and videos of girls between 4 and 15 years old “posing nude or engaged in sexual acts with adult males.”