Andrew Wolf, a 42-year-old former math teacher was sentenced to almost 39 years in federal prison for tricking his current and former students into sending him explicit photos of themselves.
He then compiled the photos and shared them with pedophiles.
Andrew Wolf was one of the most popular teachers at the elite Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. He was a coach to players on the middle-school baseball team, a recognized instructor, and a tutor to the dozens of boys who passed through his eighth-grade classroom each year.
Wolf would share photos of what he described as third and fourth-graders with a chilling affixed message to the group.
FBI Hunted Wolf Down
Evidence uncovered by FBI agents showed that Wolf’s interest surfaced years before he started teaching in 2004 at Chestnut Hill — a private K-12 campus in Northwest Philadelphia where annual tuition ranges from $32,000 to $43,000.
He spent hours communicating over encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, collecting a trove of explicit photos and videos of young boys and writing short stories detailing horrific assaults of children that he posted on internet forums.
That interest deepened after he landed his job as a teacher. Wolf quickly began expressing a sexual interest in his students — who ranged in age from 13 to 15 — in online conversations with several other men interested in child pornography, including one who went by the screen name “Mr. Pickles” and claimed to be a teacher.
Several students have since transferred out of Chestnut Hill, finding it too difficult to return to a campus where their classmates know what happened to them, several parents said.
School administrators said in a statement they were still offering psychological counseling to anyone who needed support.
The Sentence
But as U.S. District Judge Mark A. Kearney prepared to announce Wolf’s sentence, he insisted that the court hearing could never bring the families or their children the closure they were seeking.
“Every one of these boys has been subject to severe trauma,” he said. “Stop thinking of vengeance and start thinking of your boys and the treatment they need.”
In addition to his prison term, Wolf was ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution and fines and to serve five years probation upon his release.