A Virginia Beach man widely known locally for plotting to kill dozens of Landstown High School students 15 years ago was found guilty Thursday of numerous child pornography charges.
Philip Charles Bay, 33, was found guilty of 20 counts of possession of child pornography following a two-day bench trial before Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Kevin M. Duffan.
A Verizon cloud storage service that automatically scans stored images for suspected child pornography first reported the case to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
That led to Virginia Beach surveilling and searching Bay’s home off Princess Anne Road in June 2023 and seizing multiple electronic devices.
On the cloud storage service, police investigators found 20 sexually explicit pictures that became subject of this week’s trial. Those images — of girls between about 8 and 12 years old — had been uploaded to the cloud eight months before Bay’s home was searched.
Bay was arrested on June 22, 2023.
His attorney, Eric Korslund, honed in on the fact that the images were stored on the cloud service — which backed up data automatically — and not on Bay’s electronic devices.
“My argument was that in order for somebody to be found guilty of (child porn) possession, the commonwealth has to prove that they knew the stuff was on there,” Korslund said. “You may not necessarily know what’s on the cloud, because every time it backs it up, you don’t get a notification.”
Virginia Beach prosecutors, however, contended the images came from Bay.
According to the Verizon cloud service data, the images came from the same make and model phone Bay used. Moreover, several other pictures of Bay were uploaded to the cloud storage service around that same time — with no evidence anyone else had access to it.
The first child possession count is a Class 6 felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. The other 19 counts are Class 5 felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years. That means Bay faces a maximum 195 years when Duffan sentences him Nov. 26.
The guilty verdicts come 15 years after the Landstown High School case. In April 2009, when Bay was 17, police discovered hours of homemade videos and journal entries indicating he’d been plotting to attack fellow Landstown students on the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
Investigators also found a stockpile of Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs in Bay’s home. They determined that he developed a hit list of targeted students and enlisted two younger classmates to help.
But one of those classmates tipped off police just two weeks before the planned attack. Word spread quickly among students and more than 850 students were reported absent that day.
In 2011, Bay was sentenced to 12 years in prison on multiple terrorism, weapons and conspiracy charges. He was released from prison in that case in October 2019.
Staff writer Jane Harper contributed to this report.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
A correction was made on Aug. 29, 2024: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story gave an incorrect spelling for Landstown High School.
