Dreams shattered

Name: WORLD
Price range: $

Three people charged with pornography-related crimes last week

Parry McCluer High School used to have a champion football team. But since 2004, they haven't won more than three games a season.

Football coach Matthew Wheeler was hired to change that losing streak. But less than a month after he was hired as the school's head football coach, he was arrested for allegedly posting links to child pornography on an online bulletin board.

The Roanoke Times reports that Wheeler, 31, was identified during a detention hearing last Monday in U.S. District Court in Roanoke. Wheeler is being held without bond in a local jail pending transfer to Lafayette, La., where he will stand trial. Federal authorities in Louisiana allege that Wheeler was among at least 22 members of an online bulletin board on which participants posted links to child pornography.

Buena Vista City Schools Superintendent Rebecca Gates said Tuesday in a statement that a teacher had been suspended following his arrest by federal authorities. She didn't identify the teacher or the charges.

According to the Sexual Recovery Institute, sex is the most prevalent topic for Internet searches, and a few keystrokes can lead to over 1.3 million porn sites that are available. Over 60 percent of all Internet visits involve a sexual purpose, and with an annual revenue of $13 billion, the pornography industry rakes in profits larger than Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc., Yahoo Inc., Apple Inc., Netflix Inc. and EarthLink, combined.

"Pornography is the drug of the millennium and more addictive than crack cocaine," Donna Rice Hughes told the Washington Times. Hughes is president of Enough Is Enough, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works to make the Internet safer for children and families. "[EIE's] goal is that there be as much protection online as there is offline."

And it's a lot more prevalent than we would like to think. On Wednesday, a former James Madison University professor was sentenced in federal court in Harrisonburg to more than 11 years in prison for distributing child pornography.

U.S. Attorney Timothy J. Heaphy says in a news release that James Lesner Query, 55, admitted he went into an Internet chat room in December 2009 and ultimately distributed three images of child pornography to another user in exchange for other images.

Query had been a communications studies professor at James Madison since 2006. He was placed on administrative leave last September when the allegations surface. A James Madison spokesman told the Daily News-Record that Query was no longer employed at the university as of December 2010.

"If they're an addict, they stop developing spiritually, relationally and morally, at the age of the onset of the addiction," said Douglas Weiss, a licensed psychologist, according to the Washington Times.

Pornography can also quickly lead from the virtual world to the real world. On Jul. 13, a 72-year-old staffer at an employment agency was arrested after he allegedly locked a female job seeker in a room on July 7 to watch pornography before sexually assaulting her. Fairfax County police charged Choon Sik Lee of Annandale with two counts of attempted forcible sodomy. He is in custody pending an Aug. 3 preliminary hearing.

Lee worked at the World Employment Agency in Annandale. According to police, the victim fled the building after telling Lee she needed to use the restroom. Police say they subsequently discovered a second similar incident and are investigating whether other women may have been victimized.

"If you don't think you can fall into any kind of sexual temptation, you're either godlier than David, wiser than Solomon, or stronger than Samson," Hughes told the Times.

In the meantime, the Parry McCluer High School football team's dreams of rising to the top again will have to wait. Wheeler's position as head coach is currently listed on the school system's website as vacant.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Join the conversation on this article.