A man who advises a Massachusetts high school robotics team was arrested Monday on suspicion of possessing images and video of child sex abuse, federal prosecutors said.
Brian Lingard, a 60-year-old from Shrewsbury, is accused of having about 135 videos of apparent child sexual abuse on his computer and about 23 such images on his phone. He also had images that appeared to show the rear ends of fully clothed girls taken at Shrewsbury High School, where Lingard is a mentor of the robotics team, the U.S. Attorney's Office for Massachusetts said in a statement Monday.
Lingard was due to face charges of transporting and possessing child pornography in federal court in Worcester on Monday. Each charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison; it wasn't immediately clear if he had an attorney who could speak to his arrest.
The images were first discovered on Thursday, Oct. 19, when Lingard was going through customs in Boston after a flight from Paris, prosecutors said. He allegedly admitted having the images, and a search the next week of his computer and another phone at his home revealed the videos, which depicted graphic sex acts, according to an affidavit filed Friday by an investigator with the Department of Homeland Security.
Get Boston local news, weather forecasts, lifestyle and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Boston’s newsletters.
Also on Lingard's phone, the investigator said, were images of "fully clothed females, who appear to be minors, located in what looks to be a school setting. The images appear to have been taken surreptitiously and are focused on the buttocks of the females."
Location data associated with those images, which were taken between 2018 and 2023, allegedly indicated they were taken at Shrewsbury High School.
Lingard has volunteered with the robotics team for 10 years, but he was banned from campus and from speaking with anyone at the school district when agents reached out last week, Shrewsbury Superintendent of Schools Joe Sawyer said in a statement to the community on Monday.
Shrewsbury High School is reaching out to students associated with the robotics team with support and to field questions or concerns they have about what happened, Sawyer said. He noted that there is no indication concerns were raised about Lingard in his role as a mentor in the past, and that he's passed criminal background checks as recently as August.
While federal prosecutors have indicated that the apparent images of girls taken at Shrewsbury High School "are not considered child pornography and are not part of the criminal charges, this information is deeply disturbing nonetheless," Sawyer said.
Lingard also worked for Bose, which said Monday that his employment has ended.
"We have learned of the disturbing charges against Brian Lingard, and can confirm that as of today Brian is no longer an employee of Bose," a company spokesperson said.
