Midland Man Arrested for Possessing Lewd Images of Children While at Angelo State University

SAN ANGELO- A Midland man was arrested in San Angelo Wednesday for possession of lewd images of a child while attending Angelo State University two years ago.

According to court documents, the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office received a cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or NCMEC.

That tip revealed that Google had reported that an unknown person had uploaded six photos, two GIF images, and one video on September 27, 2020, and November 13, 2020, that contained suspected child pornography to a Google Drive. Google provided the nine media files to NCMEC. Those files were then sent to the Sheriff’s Office.

A Grand Jury subpoena was issued to Google which then provided information that revealed the defendant’s name as William Hoak. The information also provided a Midland address, his phone number, and credit and debit cards associated with the account.

The investigator conducted a search and was given information from Angelo State University that Hoak was a student living in campus housing during the Fall Semester of 2020. The Affiant also discovered that two IP addresses used to upload the child pornography to the Google Drive were both registered to ASU.

An interview was conducted with Hoak where he stated that the Google account was his account. Hoak also told the investigator that he did live on campus at ASU and the phone number found in the information was his phone number. Hoal told the investigator that he found the lewd image files on Tumblr, saved them to his phone, and then uploaded them to his Google Drive.

Hoak admitted that the young girls looked to be about six to 10 years old and that he only kept the pornographic images for about a week then deleted them because “it felt wrong”.

The images in question depicted young, prepubescent male and female children and were extremely graphic. The children were either nude or had their torso exposed and they were engaging in sexual activity or in sexually suggestive poses. 

Hoak was arrested on October 26, 2022 and was booked into the Tom Green County Detention Facility. He was released on October 27, 2022, on $25,000 bond.