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LSU Foundation employee caught with child porn after deputies uncovered disturbing online messages
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UPDATE: Chase Kojis was booked into jail again Friday on additional charges after investigators discovered he was allegedly impersonating more people online, including a 17-year-old girl.
Read more here: https://www.wbrz.com/news/after-child-porn-arrest-fired-lsu-employee-faces-more-charges-for-impersonating-teenage-girl-online
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BATON ROUGE - An employee with the LSU Foundation was arrested for child porn after deputies linked him to a disturbing online profile where he allegedly pretended to be someone else.
Chase Kojis was fired Tuesday from his role as facilities coordinator at the LSU Foundation, the university's fundraising arm. The East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office said Tuesday that Kojis was arrested after the department was tipped off about a user describing child sex abuse on Tumblr, a social media platform.
Kojis was allegedly using the account to impersonate someone else and posted other peoples' private photos on the website. An arrest warrant says he also used the profile to have conversations with other users who wanted to discuss "breeding" young children.
"This morning they went to his home and executed search warrants and found evidence that supported he created the accounts and was taking the victims' public images of her and her family and altering them to appear like child porn with their same facial features," EBR Sheriff's spokeswoman Casey Hicks said.
While searching Kojis' phone, investigators reportedly found a "hidden" folder containing at least two images of child porn and another picture showing an animal being sexually abused. They also found photoshopped images of children who had their clothes digitally removed.
Kojis was booked for pornography involving juveniles, sexual abuse of an animal, online impersonation, and nonconsensual disclosure of a private image.
"We have a detective that is assigned to the Bureau of the Cyber Crimes Unit, and she works constantly on cases like this and has been working hard," Hicks said. "We are seeing more and more of these arrests due to her due diligence on these cases."
The LSU Police Department alerted the foundation to Kojis' arrest Tuesday morning, and the organization said it immediately fired him due to the "egregiously unacceptable nature" of the accusations.
Read the statement from the LSU Foundation below:
We were made aware of the arrest of one of our employees off-campus by the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office. Given the egregiously unacceptable nature of the charges, his employment was immediately terminated.
Kojis was reportedly released on a $65,000 bond Wednesday morning following his arrest.
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