VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A Virginia Beach man who has already been to prison for threats to bomb and shoot up Landstown High School was convicted of another crime Tuesday. This time, he's going to prison on child pornography charges.
Philip Bay, 33, will serve at least 20 years after he was found guilty of possessing child pornography. This isn't the first crime he'll serve time for: five years ago, he was released from prison after threatening to bomb Landstown High School back in 2009.
Watch previous coverage: Virginia Beach man found guilty on child pornography charges
Bay was arrested in June of 2023 after police found his phone number attached to a Verizon cloud storage. The cloud storage was reported to have multiple forms of child pornography, along with photos of Bay in states of undress, his driver's license, and social security card.
On Tuesday, Bay addressed the court for about 40 minutes, saying since his release, he accepted his past actions.
He said he doesn't bring up the threat made to Landstown High when he was 17 because he does not want to see someone copy his actions.
Watch related coverage: Parent reacts after Chesapeake teacher charged with child porn
He went on to say that he had no idea his cloud storage was even active and that he had knowledge of someone else in the case who had threatened to tamper with cloud devices before.
He also claimed he was being set up, saying that someone put an SD card in his phone to scan for viruses in the past. However, the commonwealth's attorney says Bay's defense team didn't bring it up during the bench trial back in August.
"That friend that he eluded to we were prepared for," Brandon Emery, assistant commonwealth's attorney, said. "The defense chose not to raise that defense directly and so the trial did not go into it but it's something the Commonwealth was expecting may great its head at some point."
The judge sentenced Bay to 100 years with 80 years suspended for the charges. Bay already spent eight years in prison for the threats to Landstown High School. He was sentenced to 68 years in prison back in 2011 but ended up serving eight years before being released in 2019. Authorities say he's still on probation for that case.
When it comes to violating his probation, prosecutors say that will be solved in a different hearing.
"We'll come back here probably at some point at this point in the new year and they will bring in all the old facts and the reason for the violation is obviously this," Emery said. "At that time the Commonwealth will make the appropriate argument about comparing and contrasting what one should and shouldn't be going when given probation"
