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Night custodian at Westborough elementary school charged with possession of child pornography

A night custodian at an elementary school in Westborough has been charged with possession of child pornography and placed on administrative leave after graphic images of girls as young as 5 were found among his digital files stored online in the cloud, officials said Tuesday.

Westborough police said the images recovered do not depict local children and that after a search of the school, “no electronic devices were found that would capture images of students.”

Andrew Size, 52, of Westborough, who worked at Fales Elementary School, was arraigned Tuesday in Westborough District Court, where he pleaded not guilty, according to officials and court records.

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Size was released with a GPS monitoring device and orders to submit to home confinement, with permission to leave for medical, legal, or religious reasons, a spokeswoman for Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. said in an e-mail. He was also ordered to have no unsupervised contact with children under 18 and no internet access, and to stay away from all Westborough Public Schools,

He is due back in court Dec. 15, according to court records.

Size’s attorney did not immediately respond to request for comment Tuesday evening.

Amber Bock, superintendent of Westborough Public Schools, said in a statement to teachers and families Tuesday that she had learned of the investigation into Size late Monday afternoon, and that he “has been placed on administrative leave and will not be allowed to return to campus pending the outcome of this investigation.”

“We are shocked and saddened that a member of our school community is allegedly involved with such an awful and damaging situation,” Bock said.

Police “have reassured us that none of the content being reviewed as part of the investigation has any connection to Fales Elementary School or the Westborough Public Schools,” the superintendent said.

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Westborough investigators and a specialized electronic detection K-9 unit provided by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department in Hoffstown, N.H., searched the elementary school Monday afternoon and found no inappropriate content related to the investigation in either the physical facility or its computer network, according to Bock and Westborough police.

The investigation began after the State Police Cyber Crime Unit and Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received two reports that came in through the tip line of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding the sharing of child sexual abuse material online, according to court documents.

A Westborough police detective was assigned to investigate the tips, which indicated that digital files of child pornography had been automatically uploaded from a cellphone in Westborough to be stored virtually online, according to the filings.

One image showed a girl about age 5 to 7 whose legs were “spread in a lascivious manner,” according to the documents. Another showed a girl of about the same age exposing herself in the backseat of a vehicle, the filings said.

The attorney general’s office subpoenaed phone records for the account associated with the files and found the account holder to be Size, according to the documents.

In early September, the Westborough detective found Size’s personal information through the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and the following week she staked out Size’s home for several days, the documents show.

That week, the investigator also obtained a search warrant from Westborough District Court for Size’s phone data, according to the filings. A cloud storage provider handed over 27 gigabytes of data containing more than 10,000 files, including “multiple files [of] sexual abuse material,” such as photos and videos of naked girls with estimated ages from 5 to 13, the documents show.

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On Monday, the detective obtained a search warrant for Size’s apartment, and police went there and spoke with Size, who allegedly admitted violating child pornography laws, according to the filings.

“Andrew stated he frequently deletes the contents on his digital devices due to his fear of being caught,” the investigator wrote.

At the apartment, police seized two cellphones belonging to Size, as well as a laptop and two desktop computers, according to the filings. He was arrested and taken to police headquarters for booking.


Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com. Follow him @jeremycfox.