A former U.S. Department of State employee was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison for engaging in sexual conduct with Filipino minors, according to officials.
According to court documents, Dean Edward Cheves, 63, served at the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines from 2017 to 2021.
From December 2020 to March 2021, Cheves used a messaging application installed on his cell phone to chat with a 15- to 16-year-old Philippine minor, whom he paid to create and send to him sexually explicit images of the minor.
Additionally, in February 2021, Cheves engaged in sex acts on two separate occasions with another 16-year-old Philippine minor whom he met online.
Cheves used his government-issued cell phone to film the sex acts on at least one of those occasions.
The child sex abuse material that Cheves produced was found on the phone after it was seized from Cheves’ embassy residence in the Philippines.
Cheves knew the ages of both minors at the time he engaged in the conduct.
Trial Attorney Gwendelynn Bills of the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lauren Pomerantz Halper and Zoe Bedell for the Eastern District of Virginia prosecuted the case.