photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured in March of 2022. The center houses the Douglas County District Court and other county services.

A Lawrence man was ordered on Thursday to stand trial on multiple counts of possessing and trading child pornography over the internet, and the prosecution added an additional count of trading to his charges.

The man, James D. Kaberline II, 41, is now facing five counts of internet trading of child pornography and four counts of sexual exploitation of a child by possessing media of a child under the age of 18, after a preliminary hearing in which a Lawrence police detective testified about his investigation into Kaberline’s phone and internet sharing services.

The charges relate to multiple incidents between December 2021 and February 2022, according to charging documents. Kaberline was arrested at his home in connection with the charges on March 22, 2022, and released on a $20,000 bond, as the Journal-World reported.

On Thursday, Detective Joshua Leitner testified that his investigation began with a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that a device in Douglas County had been flagged for possessing images of child sexual abuse. He issued a warrant to Google to find the owner of the device, and Google responded with information that connected the device to Kaberline.

After making that connection, Leitner said he executed another warrant on March 22, 2022, to search and seize any devices that Kaberline owned. He took possession of Kaberline’s phone and ran it through a data extraction process. The extraction revealed multiple videos on his phone and account information for an encrypted file-sharing service that had additional videos, Leitner said. Many of the videos had been shared with other users of the file service while Kaberline was in Lawrence, Leitner said.

Most of the materials were videos of children with adults, and one of the videos may have been a computer-generated re-creation that was very realistic, Leitner said.

Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden said that the additional trading count was added after the defendant’s attorney, Thomas Bath, had asked for the prosecution to be more specific about the images and videos it was charging Kaberline for possessing.

An affidavit in support of Kaberline’s arrest alleges that he sent or received over 1,000 images using the file-sharing service Kik after downloading the app in November 2021. NCMEC flagged 12 of the shared images as child pornography. Some of the images that were shared included pictures of Kaberline himself, the affidavit said. The pornographic materials Kaberline allegedly uploaded included a child as young as 8 years old and a one-minute video of a 13-year-old girl with a dog, according to the affidavit.

Judge Sally Pokorny said after hearing testimony Thursday that sufficient evidence existed to establish probable cause and ordered Kaberline to stand trial. Bath requested a status conference so he could get a transcript of Leitner’s testimony for a digital expert to review the details of how Leitner connected the specific videos and images to Kaberline’s accounts. Pokorny scheduled the conference for June 28.