A former Blount County educator on Thursday admitted to filming a young girl who was at his home visiting his daughter eight years ago.
Tim Clevenger, a 54-year-old former assistant principal at Locust Fork High School, was convicted in 2018 of production of child pornography and possession of child pornography at the conclusion of a jury trial. The trial in 2018 involved a different victim than the cases for which he pleaded guilty today.
On Thursday, Clevenger issued a guilty plea to two additional counts of production of child pornography and two additional counts of possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to 18 years on each of the production counts and seven years on each of the possession of child pornography charges.
“Today, for the first time, Tim Clevenger admitted that he perpetuated these horrific crimes against a young girl. In 2018, he refused to acknowledge his guilt in the trial related to the first victim and instead testified that his 9-year-old son had snuck out of the house at night and took these videos and downloaded them onto this computer,’' Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey said. “The evidence showed that the downloads took place at 1:30 a.m. on his school computer and that there was no physical way that the 9-year-old could have done this.”
“It takes a real piece of crap to blame their own child for committing such vile acts knowing that they had actually done it,” Casey said.
The district attorney had asked that the sentences be run consecutive with the first victim. The court ran them concurrently. The second victim was present in court today to hear Clevenger admit his guilt
The initial video was discovered on school owned laptop that Clevenger had sent to the central office for technical support. A search warrant for additional electronic devices at his home and the field house at the school and their contents discovered the other videos and the additional victim.
The videos had been taken in 2013. Clevenger videoed the victims from outside the bathroom window at his home in Cleveland when the young girls would come to visit his daughter. The videos were taken at night when the girls were unaware that he was outside watching them.
Clevenger was first arrested in 2015 when he was still the assistant principal. According to arrest affidavits in the 2015 case, Clevenger video recorded the girl while she was a visitor at his home in December 2013. Clevenger stood outside of his home and photographed the nude girl as she prepared to take a shower. Court records showed Clevenger was recording through the blinds, and that the girl didn’t know she was being recorded.
He was arrested again in 2017 on the second victim. The records stated he made a video of the second victim through the blinds of his home.
Clevenger has been an inmate in the Alabama Department of Corrections since June of 2018.