Arkansas State Police agents on Tuesday arrested a Harrison man who authorities say had child sexual abuse material on his device and engaged in a sexual chat online with a teenage girl, the state police said Wednesday.
Agents and Harrison police following a cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children executed a search warrant at the home of Justin Perkuhn, 38, leading to his arrest and the seizure of his devices, according to a state police news release.
Investigators determined that Perkuhn had exchanged nude photos of two minors with a 17-year-old girl during a graphic sexual chat and located 34 videos and six images of child sexual abuse materials he had uploaded to a cloud-based storage server.
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Perkuhn had more child sex abuse photos and videos on his phone, authorities said, which allowed them to identify and locate two victims who live near Perkuhn.
Authorities booked Perkuhn into the Boone County jail, where he was being held in lieu of a $750,000 bond on 50 counts of possession of child sexual abuse material and one count each of computer exploitation of a child, video voyeurism of an adult and video voyeurism of a child, the release states.
Rex Nelson has been senior editor and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 2017, and he has a biweekly podcast called “Southern Fried.”
After graduating from Ouachita Baptist University in 1981, he was a sportswriter for the Arkansas Democrat for a year before becoming editor of Arkadelphia’s Daily Siftings Herald. He was the youngest editor of a daily in Arkansas at age 23. Rex was then news and sports director at KVRC-KDEL from 1983-1985.
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He returned to the Democrat as assistant sports editor in 1985. From 1986-1989, he was its Washington correspondent. He left to be Jackson T. Stephens’ consultant.
Rex became the Democrat-Gazette’s first political editor in 1992, but left in 1996 to join then-Gov. Mike Huckabee’s office. He also served from 2005-09 in the administration of President George W. Bush.
From 2009-2018, he worked stints at the Communications Group, Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities, and Simmons First National Corp.
Dylan Sherman is a business reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He is based in Northwest Arkansas and focuses on Tyson Foods Inc. and the transportation industry. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he has been with the newspaper since 2023.
