Boca Raton Man, 18, Charged With Child Pornography Possession, Sharing

Jack Andrews (Photo: Palm Beach County Jail)

A 18-year-old Boca Raton man has been charged with possessing child pornography after a highly-technical investigation was conducted by Boca Raton police and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, a charging document stated.

Jack Andrews, 18, was arrested Jan. 28, 2026 and charged with six offenses. According to the court filing, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office began investigating the case after a police database indicated a local IP address was accessing and sharing explicit images and videos of children through a BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing application. Detectives specially trained to investigate digital child abuse material used a highly-technical algorithmic process known as SHA1, which takes note of the exact imagery and video content within a file and can match it – literally frame to frame for identification purposes – with files of the same name on a suspect’s computer.

Known as “hashing,” the algorithm produces an identifiable number that only corresponds to an exact match on a suspect’s device. The PBSO detectives ultimately tracked down the IP address to an address in Boca Raton and went there to investigate, only to find out that Boca Raton police had already seized a laptop from the home as part of their own investigation. The laptop was then turned over to PBSO and sent to the county lab for testing.

Descriptions of the videos and images are too graphic to describe in this space, but were generally about 15 minutes in length and depicted pre-pubescent children. Search warrants in the case were executed in December, with detectives unveiling their findings in court documents in January. Family members of the suspect cooperated with police, the court filing said, with user account information allegedly identifying Jack Andrews as the person who downloaded and possessed the videos.

Andrews was released on his own recognizance after his arrest and is free pending trial.