Edgewood Man Sentenced For Sexual Exploitation Of Children

BALTIMORE, MD — An Edgewood man was sentenced this week to 31 years in prison for sexually exploiting children, according to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. The Harford County man met his victims online and pretended to be a teenage boy, pressuring them to send him sexually explicit pictures, officials said.

It is not the first time that Brian Shumate, 50, of Edgewood, will serve jail time for sex crimes. He traveled to Pennsylvania to have sex with a 12-year-old girl he asked to call him "daddy" in 2004, which officials reported resulted in a seven-year prison sentence.

After he was released in 2012, Shumate used the internet to communicate with girls as young as 13, sending pictures of his genitals online and pressuring the girls to take pictures of themselves engaged in sexually explicit conduct, according to court documents. Between 2013 and 2015, he continued this pattern, sometimes telling his victims his real age and threatening them and their families unless they continued sending him pictures, officials reported.

Shumate violated his parole three times since his release from prison in 2012 and was convicted of failing to register as a sex offender, for which he served nearly four months in jail in 2014.

"In June 2014, while in the Harford County Detention Center, Shumate called an acquaintance who informed him that the FBI was asking about his phone and social network accounts, including email and Facebook," according to a statement from the Maryland district attorney's office. "The acquaintance also told Shumate that the FBI wanted access to Shumate’s phone and tablet. Shumate instructed the acquaintance to delete specific numbers and images from the phone (the numbers and images were all females), and to wipe the phone of all content."

U.S. District Judge James Bredar ordered Shumate on Thursday to serve 31 years in prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release.

Photo of Brian Shumate courtesy of the Maryland sex offenders registry.