48-year-old Steven Wayne Erickson had a resume most small towns would be proud of. He sat on the Pulaski Town Council in Virginia, elected in 2024 to a four-year term he won’t be finishing under normal circumstances.
He also ran the county’s Work Report Program, and according to the Department of Justice, he’d previously worked as a sheriff’s deputy and a corrections officer, just not in Pulaski County itself. Pulaski’s own sheriff’s office was quick to clarify that Erickson never worked for them in any capacity. So whatever badge he once carried, it wasn’t a local one.
Three separate positions of public trust stacked on top of each other over the course of one career, and this past week the FBI showed up and arrested the man holding all three on a federal complaint charging receipt and distribution of CSAM on the mobile messgaing app Kik.
If you’re unfamiliar with Kik, it’s a messaging app that’s been a magnet for exactly this kind of case for years now, popular in part because it doesn’t require a phone number to sign up, which makes it attractive to sex offenders, pedophiles, CSAM collectors, and child traffickers.
Erickson apparently understood that appeal well enough to run two separate Kik accounts at once. A cyber tip is what got the ball rolling when someone flagged possible exploitation happening on the app. From there the FBI pulled search warrants and started reconstructing exactly what Erickson had allegedly been doing.
Back in 2025, a user going by “Cravt” sent Erickson close to a hundred photos of his own family, including kids of elementary school age, and Erickson encouraged him to run those images through AI to alter them. Here we go with the AI again.
Cravt obliged, eventually sending back AI-generated CSAM that depicted at least one of his own children, and Erickson responded with sexually explicit video of himself.
When people tell me that a parent could never exploit their kids to strangers, I show them stories like this where a father sent images of his kids to a stranger who talked him into generating AI-created CSAM from them.
Then in February of this year, a user called “Tribbin” sent Erickson hidden-camera footage of a teenage girl who had no idea she was being filmed while using the bathroom. Erickson sent back explicit video of himself and then asked Tribbin for more, and Tribbin’s response was that he hadn’t had company over lately for the camera to catch. This is the kind of detail that makes it clear how routine and transactional activity like this is among certain Kik users.
By March, Erickson was chatting with a user who claimed to have sexually assaulted his own 9-year-old daughter, and Erickson traded an explicit image of himself for an explicit photo of that child, then pushed the man to send more, specifically images of the abuse itself. That’s a subhuman of a man actively soliciting documentation of a specific little girl being hurt by her own father.
April brought two more Kik contacts into the mix. Erickson sent a user known as “Benji” photos of a minor, some apparently taken without her knowledge, and directed Benji to generate sexualized images using AI, which Erickson then paired with explicit videos of himself sent back in exchange.
Later that same month he sent similar photos of a minor to a user called “Tony,” who generated an AI video of people stripping nude, and Erickson forwarded that along to his second Kik account, apparently just to keep both pipelines fed. Throughout all of this, Erickson sent images to prove to strangers that he was a real person worth trusting, including a photo of himself touching his nose, a video stating the date and time, and a photo of a sheriff’s office badge, his thumb conveniently blocking which county it belonged to.
Erickson is currently being held without bond at the Roanoke City Adult Detention Center, and Pulaski officials have said only that they’re still learning the facts, which is the kind of non-answer you’d expect from a town that just found out its work report coordinator was allegedly running a two-account CSAM pipeline on the side.
I keep coming back to the badge, though, because it’s the detail that ties the whole thing together. A councilman is supposed to represent his constituents. A work report coordinator is supposed to help people rebuild their standing after trouble with the law. A sheriff’s deputy or corrections officer, wherever he actually served, is supposed to be the guy enforcing the rules the rest of us live by.
Erickson held some version of all three roles at different points in his life, and according to federal prosecutors, he spent 2025 and 2026 using the credibility that came with them to convince strangers on the internet he was trustworthy enough to trade in the exploitation of children.
That’s not a coincidence of biography. That’s a man who learned exactly what institutional trust looks like and figured out how to weaponize it.
And considering the way the DOJ operates lately, they would be more than happy to announce it. So I’m going to assume Deputy Councilman is not a drag queen.
(Sources)
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