November 2020 Student from Oakham caught with nearly 700 child sex photos at Birmingham University A twisted University of Birmingham student blamed the death of a pal for him collecting hundreds of child sex abuse images. Morgan Overton, a music student at the University of Birmingham, blamed the death of a childhood friend for the vile haul. He had amassed 700 photographs of children being sexually abused or tortured The 20-year-old claimed that the images and videos he’d amassed which featured boys as young as one-year-old was ‘a method of self-harm’. Overton, 20, appeared at Leicester Crown Court on Tuesday for sentencing. It came after pleading guilty to having 682 images and video files on his laptop computer. In July 2018, when Overton was 18, Leicestershire Police went to his family home in Springfield Way, Oakham, to search his electronic devices but he was away at university. Overton’s father accompanied the detectives to Birmingham University and Overton was spoken to at his halls of residence in the city and handed over his laptop and phone. He was only interviewed by the police in March the following year. He pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images at Leicester Magistrates’ Court. The child abuse files included pictures of boys aged from one to 15, and Overton’s computer also showed he had shared the internet links to indecent images with other paedophiles online, although he was not charged with distributing child sexual abuse material His computer included software to let him surf the internet anonymously and also to access to the “dark web”, which contains sites that cannot be found with ordinary search engines. Judge Robert Brown sentenced Overton to a three-year community order with 20 days of one-to-one therapy to help him avoid re-offending. Overton will also have to do 120 hours of unpaid work and will be subject to a five-year sexual harm prevention order and have to sign on at police stations for that period.