A Canadian man who had flown to Atlanta to have sex with a Cobb teenage girl last year has been sentenced by a federal judge.
Yves Joseph Legault, 54, from Toronto, will serve 16 years in prison for a variety of sexual exploitation charges that include his attempt to meet a 13-year-old Cobb County girl last year. He also will be on supervised release for life and will be deported to Canada upon his release from prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta.
Legault pleaded guilty in September to several charges, including coercing and enticing the production of child sexual exploitation images over the Internet. Federal prosecutors said he preyed on victims in Georgia and Mississippi at the same time.
He was arrested last August at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport after getting off a plane for what federal prosecutors was a trip to have sex with the Marietta girl, whom he met via Omegle, an anonymous online text and video chat tool.
During Legault’s trial, prosecutors said Legault and the girl moved their chats to Google Hangouts, where he asked her to perform sex acts for him on a live video stream. Later, he arranged to travel to Georgia to meet her for in-person sex acts.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the girl’s mother alerted the FBI after her daughter received a package from Canada, and after intercepting messages between Legault and the girl.
While Legault was facing charges in Georgia, prosecutors also said he had engaged in similar behavior with an eight-year-old girl in Pascagoula, Miss. He was charged there with one count of coercing and enticing the production of child pornography, and also pleaded guilty to that charge in federal court in Atlanta.
“Predators like Legault are always lurking on line, and a threat to our children. Hopefully his sentencing will serve as a warning to all parents to monitor what their children are doing on the internet and on their cell phones,” said Chris Hacker, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta, said in a statement.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said both the Georgia and Mississippi cases are part of the U.S. Justice Department’s Project Safe Childhood initiative to protect children from online exploitation and abuse.
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