NC man gets no prison time in child sexual abuse material case
A man police said sent 10 videos of sexual abuse material of children as young as 4 is not expected to spend any time in prison after accepting a plea deal from District Attorney Spencer Merriweather’s office on Wednesday.
Assistant District Attorney Caroline Massagee previously said Brett Kimbrell, now 20, got “preferential treatment” when a magistrate released him back “home to mommy and daddy” on a written promise to appear following his January 2025 arrest on 10 counts of felony second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor.
Now, the prosecutor has dismissed nine of those charges after Kimbrell pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. That charge related to a video of a girl in a school uniform being forced to perform oral sex, Massagee said in court Wednesday. Investigators estimated she was 8 or 10.
Cornelius Police previously said Kimbrell sent videos that showed a total of 11 girls being raped or forced to perform sexual acts. After receiving one child abuse video on the messaging app Kik, police said Kimbrell replied: “Damn, I hate the ones with no sound.”
Senior Resident Superior Judge William R. Bell ruled that Kimbrell, who was arrested as an 18-year-old, must register as a sex offender for the next 30 years and sentenced him to two years of supervised release with a suspended five-to-15-month prison term, per the plea agreement.
If he violates the conditions of his release, he will be sent to prison.
“Before agreeing to the plea arrangement, the State considered that, given the youth of the offender, the lack of any history of criminal conviction, and the classification of the offenses, there was a high likelihood that a judge would have consolidated the offenses and sentenced the defendant to probation if it proceeded to trial,” Merriweather’s spokesperson, Michael Stolp, said in an email to The Charlotte Observer.
Kimbrell’s attorney, Jason St. Aubin, said that Kimbrell took the charges seriously, took responsibility and enrolled in a treatment program as soon as he posted bond after it was revised to $75,000 in February 2025.
He is “excelling” in that program, St. Aubin told the judge.
“When you’re young and not educated, and reckless and dangerous with your actions, you can hurt people,” he said.
Kimbrell, who lived with his parents in Cornelius at the time of his arrest, now lives in Rowan County with his grandparents and works in landscaping.
