An administrator at the Tower Hill School, an elite prep school in Delaware, has been charged with dealing child pornography. William R. Ushler, 53, was arrested Tuesday, the same day authorities executed search warrants at his Wilmington home and at Tower Hill School.
Ushler has been charged with five counts of dealing in child pornography, according to the Delaware Department of Justice. He remains in custody as of this time while bail has been set at $250,000.
In an email to the school community, the Delaware prep school stated that Ushler was immediately fired and has been barred from campus. He previously served as Director of Upper School Admissions at Tower Hill.
“We were advised that law enforcement authorities know the source of the images in question, and these images do not depict Tower Hill students or children who were in contact with Mr. Ushler,” the email stated.
An investigation was opened after the Delaware Child Predator Task Force received a cyber tip line report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on April 14. The report was initiated by Yahoo! Inc., who indicated that one of its email users had transmitted files possibly containing child pornography.
The emails identified in the report included two from March 21 which showed a nude female who appeared to be 14 or 15 years old. Another email, sent on Aug. 10, 2019, showed an inappropriate image of a young teenage girl. Three more images of nude girls were found stored on Ushler’s iPhone, according to Fox 29 Philadelphia.
The Delaware prep school, Tower Hill, boasts numerous notable alumni, including Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and PA Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Tower Hill’s latest child porn scandal is not its first. School officials acknowledged that Ushler’s arrest “may have reverberations and echoes” of a similar scandal involving former headmaster Christopher Wheeler.
Wheeler was convicted in 2015 on 25 counts of dealing child porn and sentenced to 50 years in prison, though these convictions were overturned by the Delaware Supreme Court. The court argued that the search warrants that led to Wheeler’s arrest were “too broad.”
