A onetime St. Augustine businessman should serve 29 years in federal prison for trying to pay people in the Philippines to molest children on video for him, a judge has decided.
After prison, 44-year-old Jack Dymond Leach will stay under supervised release the rest of his life, register as a sex offender and pay $103,000 in restitution to child victims, U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger ruled July 21, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a release.
Leach exchanged 1,287 messages with child traffickers in the Philippines between November 2023 and March 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
The release said that in one exchange in November 2023, “Leach stated, ‘i like 3y, 5y, 8y.’ The trafficker responded, among other things, ‘I c[a]n get that age.'”
In December 2023, Leach sent the trafficker $160 to produce and send video of a child being sexually abused, the release said. It said Leach also tried to have traffickers molest two other children on camera to create videos.
Leach, the former owner of Dymeng Technology Solutions, was arrested in May 2025 and has been locked up since then.
He was indicted in June 2025 and pleaded guilty in October to attempted production of child pornography, a charge carrying a prison term ranging from 15 to 30 years.
Despite being involved in child pornography, Leach evidently presented a very different face to others.
Court records show that a Catholic priest in St. Augustine wrote a letter to Berger on Leach’s behalf in February, saying he had “come to know him well as a father, husband and parishioner. I can attest that he is a man of good character.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: St. Johns man gets 29-year prison term for overseas child porn attempt
