Polk County’s Guardians of Innocence V Stacked 1,409 Child-Abuse-Material Counts on 16 Men Including Two Disney World Workers
POLK COUNTY, FLORIDA — Sheriff Grady Judd does not whisper these charging conferences. In June 2020 he stood up Operation Guardians of Innocence V and read a list of 16 men and 1,409 felony counts of possessing or distributing child sexual abuse material. Two of the names worked at Walt Disney World. One ran the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run ride at Hollywood Studios. One ran food at Animal Kingdom Lodge. They shared a house on Calabria Avenue in Davenport and, Judd said, discovered each other’s collections only when detectives were already in the living room.
Justin Hazan, then 32, admitted downloading. An initial preview of his machines showed files of children as young as four and five. Fifteen enhanced possession counts. Arlandres Sims, then 36, a food runner, took 25 counts. They had met at Broward College and moved north together. Disney put both on unpaid leave. Judd, never short a line, told the room it really is a small world after all.
The rest of the sheet was the same pattern this newsroom has watched for a decade. John Aziz, 35, a pharmacist at Heart of Florida Medical Center, 72 counts, some files of children as young as 18 months, plus unprescribed drugs in the same search. Edgardo Acevedo Cancela, 38, a registered nurse at Osceola Regional, married, children 10 and 13, flagged through NCMEC tips. Landen Ulrich, 18, still in his parents’ house with younger siblings, 200 counts, victims as young as six months. Ages on the list ran 18 to 64. A carpenter. A truck driver. A man Judd said could be living next to anyone. Nabor Molina, 45, 125 counts and an ICE hold. The Computer Crimes unit had been serving warrants through the first months of 2020 while the parks were dark and the hospitals were full.
Judd’s briefing language has not changed across the Guardians series. These are not pictures of children without clothes, he said. They are recordings of sexual assaults that get replayed every time a file moves. “Every time one of these folks receives, downloads, uploads the victim, a child victim who’s being sexually battered or in a provocative position, that child is victimized once again.” Many of the victims in V were under a year old. That sentence is why he keeps holding the presser in a room with the mugshots on a screen.
Disney’s employment angle is the headline the national wires want. It is not the whole operation. Earlier Guardians sweeps had already pulled a guest-experience manager and a custodial worker off Disney properties, a retired middle-school assistant principal, a Lego builder attached to Merlin Entertainment, and a 16-year-old. The later cruise-staff cases that keep surfacing in comments sections are separate charging documents in separate years. What they share is a workplace that markets itself as a vault for other people’s children and a sheriff who has decided the vault is leaky.
Positions of trust keep landing on the same affidavits because the jobs put men near children and give them a story about why they are there. Theme parks, hospitals, schools, churches, youth sports. The AEGIS Alliance has tracked that list through the Valdosta State dean sting, a Disney Channel executive charged with child sex abuse, the Snohomish County Operation Guardian sweep, the Welcome to Video bust, the Elysium 87,000-member network, and Hiding In Plain Sight.
A sting this size is a snapshot, not a census. NCMEC tips, peer-to-peer hashes, and undercover accounts catch the men who still use the open pipes. They miss the ones who moved to locked groups and dead-drop drives. Judd’s unit files the counts it can prove on the devices in the house that day. The 1,409 number is a floor. “More charges pending” is the line every release carries because forensic imaging takes months and folders keep unfolding.
What the Davenport house illustrated, better than any slogan, is how two adults can share rent, a kitchen, and a commute to the same entertainment company and still pretend they do not know what is on the other hard drive until a detective is holding it. The parks sell wonder. The charging documents sell the other inventory. More under Crime News and U.S. News.
