14 Arrested in Georgia Child Sex Sting Including Dean of Valdosta State University
VALDOSTA, GEORGIA — A four-day undercover operation in Lowndes County ended with 14 men in handcuffs, and the highest-profile name on the booking sheet was a university dean. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced that Keith Andrew Walters, then 44, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at Valdosta State University and a chemistry professor, had been charged with sexual exploitation of children and three counts of obscene internet contact with a child after he tried to meet someone he believed was a minor for sex.
GBI spokeswoman Lindsay Marchant said the sting, dubbed Operation Broken Arrow, took months of planning and pulled in nearly 20 local, state, and federal agencies. Investigators said the men used internet chatrooms, struck up conversations with people they thought were children, and steered those chats into sexual territory. In some cases, Marchant said, suspects introduced pornography or asked for nude images. Every man arrested, she said, believed he was traveling to a prearranged meeting for sex with a child.
Valdosta State placed Walters on immediate administrative leave and stripped him of the dean’s title. University president Richard Carvajal said that under University System of Georgia rules, Walters would remain on paid faculty leave while the criminal and internal investigations ran, with the dean’s portion of his salary eliminated. A VSU spokeswoman told reporters the school would assist law enforcement « in any way. » Wikipedia and subsequent university records list Walters as no longer employed by Valdosta State.
Walters was released on bond days after the arrest. The other 13 men, ages 24 to 57, included a carpenter, a truck driver, a forklift operator, electricians, and a retail manager: Dave Vincent Almon, 43; Stephen Carter, 57; Walter Lee Curry, 33; Eric Copeland, 33; Jamian Hogan, 34; Henry Hursey, 45; Andega Mainah, 35; Keith Morrison, 43; Wyman Rene Phillips, 36; Wilford Sermons, 28; Josue Trejo, 31; Jamari D. Tripp, 24; and Justin Na’eem Warren, 24. Investigators said they had traveled from across South Georgia to the meet location.
The pattern is one The AEGIS Alliance has documented for years. Undercover internet stings keep pulling in men who hold positions of trust — school employees, police, clergy, and university administrators — because those jobs put them near children and give them cover. See our reporting on the Polk County sting that arrested Disney World employees, the arrest of Climax, Georgia’s mayor on child sex charges, and Operation Guardian in Snohomish County. The same networks show up in the Elysium dark-web bust of 87,000 members and the 2019 worldwide child-porn takedown.
GBI’s own later operations have not slowed. Georgia and neighboring states continue to run similar chat-based stings because the volume of men willing to travel for sex with a child has not dropped. NCMEC has reported that reports of online enticement have climbed year after year, a trend we covered when the FBI warned parents about the rise in child sextortion. For the longer history of how elite abuse networks hide in institutions, start with Hiding in Plain Sight and the banned documentary Conspiracy of Silence.
The Valdosta case is not a one-off embarrassment for a single campus. It is another data point in a pattern this newsroom has tracked from Hollywood’s An Open Secret to the arrest of a Disney Channel executive and the later California child-sex crime sweep of more than 140 arrests. Operation Broken Arrow put 14 names on a GBI charging document. The institutions that hired them, promoted them, and left them around children are the rest of the story. More crime news from The AEGIS Alliance is archived under U.S. News.
