Last week, May 26, 2017, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal that had been made in the conviction and sentencing of former Cumby ISD Math Teacher Lucus Ray Hill. Hill was sentenced to 405 months (33 years, 9 months) in Federal Prison Friday morning, August 19, 2016. He was found guilty of enticement of a minor. He will also serve five years supervised release when he leaves prison after serving the day-for-day sentence. According to Lewis Tatum, then Chief Criminal Investigator and now Hopkins County Sheriff, the sentence was the maximum allowed by federal law guidelines.
HILL,LUCAS RAY
On May 30, 2015, Hill was arrested for impersonation—name and persona to create a page—and for possession of child pornography. Hill, 38, was accused of stealing an identity and establishing a fake social media account which he used to exploit children including the requesting of and soliciting of child pornography. He had maintained a large library of pages and pictures in the social media account. Corley Weatherford, Sergeant with the Hopkins County Sheriff’s office, working with the Internet Crimes Against Children and Amanda Weatherford of the Sulphur Springs Police Department, led the investigation. Accompanied by investigators from the Hopkins County Sheriff’s office and ICAC, Weatherford served warrants on Hill on the morning of May 30th following graduation exercises at Cumby High School. At that time, law enforcement seized numerous electronic devices used to obtain child pornography photos.
Hill had posed as a teenage boy. From October 2013, He is alleged to have contacted a number of females including children who may have attended Cumby schools. Officials say he chatted with females and persuaded them to engage in sexually explicit conduct, including producing images and videos of themselves engaging in sexual activity.
