Virginia Beach man who once plotted school attack found guilty on child porn charges
A Virginia Beach man widely known locally for plotting to kill dozens of Lansdown High School students 15 years ago was found guilty Thursday of numerous child pornography charges.
Philip Charles Bay, 33, was found guilty of 20 counts of possession of child pornography. The verdicts followed a two-day bench trial before Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Kevin M. Duffan.
Bay was arrested in June 2023 after police searched his family’s home off Princess Anne Road, collecting several laptops and cell phones.
Investigators ultimately found 33 explicit images of girls that prosecutors estimated were between 8 and 12 years old. Most of those pictures were not found on the devices, but on a Verizon remote cloud storage service. Trial evidence showed that the pictures had been uploaded to the cloud in October of 2022.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children first tipped the Virginia Beach Police off to the case, according to court documents filed in the case.
Bay’s attorney, Eric Korslund, said the images were stored on a remote storage system and not on the devices.
The first child possession count is a Class 6 felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. The other 19 counts are Class 5 felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years. That means Bay faces a maximum term of 195 years when Duffan sentences him on Nov. 26.
The guilty verdicts come 15 years after the Lansdown High School case. In April 2009, when Bay was 17, police discovered hours of homemade videos and journal entries indicating he’d been plotting to attack fellow Lansdown students on the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
Investigators also found a stockpile of Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs in Bay’s home. They determined that he developed a hit list of targeted students and that he enlisted two younger classmates to help. But one of those classmates tipped of police just two weeks before the planned attack. Though the plot was foiled, word spread quickly among students and more than 850 students were reported absent that day.
In 2011,Bay was sentenced to 12 years in prison on multiple terrorism, weapons and conspiracy charges. He was released from prison in that case in October 2019.
Staff writer Jane Harper contributed to this report.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, [email protected]
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