ATHENS, Texas — The former mayor of Athens, Texas, has been sentenced on charges related to child obscenity, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney's Office today.
ATHENS, Texas — The former mayor of Athens, Texas, has been sentenced on charges related to child obscenity, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney's Office today.
65-year-old James Monte Montgomery had previously pleaded guilty to sending obscene materials to a minor on August 25, 2022. Today, September 6, 2023, he was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle.
According to public information and that presented in court, on June 3, 2021, Montgomery was arrested after arriving at an undisclosed location after soliciting sex online with investigators posing as minors.
The investigation began the year prior, in June 2020, when federal prosecutors say Montgomery, then the mayor of Athens, began communicating by text messaging with a person he believed to be a 15-year-old female — instead, it was the investigator with the Collin County Sheriff's Office's Child Exploitation Unit posing as the minor.
"Montgomery sent messages to the child describing sexually explicit acts that he wanted to perform on the child and offering to pay the child if she would meet him and have sex with him," stated federal prosecutors.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Tyler Field Office, with assistance from the Texas Department of Public Safety, Collin County Sheriff’s Office, and the Department of Homeland Security-Homeland Security Investigations. This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Austin Wells.