SO SAD: TREVOR LAWRENCE EXPLAINED WHY HE WILL NO LONGER CONTINUE WITH THE TEAM…

 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that Samuel Arthur Thompson, 53, of St. Augustine, was found guilty in November of producing, receiving, and possessing child sex abuse material; producing it while required to register as a sex offender; violating the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act; sending unauthorized damaging commands to a protected computer; and possessing a firearm as a felon. Thompson was fired from the Jacksonville Jaguars Jumbotron and faced a sentence of 220 years in federal prison for multiple offenses involving sexual abuse of children.

In 1998, Thompson was found guilty in Alabama of sodomizing a fourteen-year-old boy. About 2013, the Jaguars engaged him as a contractor to help with the design and setup of their new video board network, which they would eventually use for gameday operations. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claims that although he was required by his contract to disclose his conviction, he failed to do so. Following their discovery of Thompson’s conviction and registration as a sex offender, the Jaguars decided not to extend his contract in January 2018.

The investigation found that Thompson had installed remote access software on a Jaguars spare server prior to his contract expiring. Then, during three 2018 games, he gained remote access to the computers that managed the Jumbotron, causing the video boards to keep breaking.

The Jaguars discovered that someone was using the backup server to send commands, which was the source of the outages. Thus, they established a “honeypot” by isolating the server from the other computers that ran the Jumbotron and placing it on its own network. The backup server was once more remotely accessed during the following NFL game, and this time it revealed the intruder’s IP address. The U.S. Attorney’s Office stated that Thompson’s residence was eventually located by the FBI.