Christopher Allen-Shinn, 44, of Shreveport, Louisiana, was sentenced on child pornography charges, announced United States Attorney Brandon B. Brown. Allen-Shinn was sentenced by United States District Judge Elizabeth E. Foote to 210 months (17 years, 6 months) in prison, followed by 5 years of supervised release.
Allen-Shinn pleaded guilty on March 30, 2022, to a Bill of Information charging him with one count of receipt of child pornography. This charge was the result of an investigation by the Office of Special Investigations (“OSI”) of Barksdale Air Force Base (“BAFB”) into several cyber-tip reports received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (“NCMEC”) in April 2021. These NCMEC reports indicated that a Dropbox account registered to a BAFB resident was being used to store child pornography on a cloud account. Investigators with the Louisiana State Attorney General’s Office and OSI reviewed 37 of the images forwarded by NCMEC and confirmed that the images contained child pornography. OSI confirmed that the internet service account that was used for the Dropbox account was registered to Christopher Allen-Shinn’s residence on BAFB. He was a civilian employed as a historian at BAFB.
A search warrant was executed at Allen-Shinn’s residence on April 16, 2021. During the search, OSI agents conducted an examination of some of Allen-Shinn’s computer devices and storage media. Agents identified multiple images of child pornography. Further examination of his computer revealed that the defendant received images of child pornography from December 2020 to April 2021. These images included sexually explicit images that the defendant solicited online from minor females in exchange for money. During this time period, Allen-Shinn resided at and was a full-time civilian employee at BAFB. Allen-Shinn admitted to downloading the child pornography and to soliciting underage females online for sexually explicit images in exchange for money.
The case was investigated by Barksdale Air Force Base’s Office of Special Investigations and Louisiana State Attorney General’s Office and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Earl M. Campbell.