Inmate sentenced to 24 years for brutal murder of leader of international child porn ring in Michigan prison

An inmate was sentenced to 24 more years in prison after admitting to ruthlessly killing a fellow prisoner – who was a convicted child predator.

Adam Taylor Wright pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 2019 death of Christian Maire at the Milan Correctional Facility in Milan, Michigan. On Wednesday, United States District Court Judge Paul D. Borman sentenced Wright to 24 years and four months for the brutal murder. Wright's sentence will run concurrently/consecutively to the sentences of imprisonment he is serving for other crimes.

On Jan. 2, 2019, Wright and his co-inmates Alex Albert Castro, 42, and Jason Dale Kechego, 41, killed fellow prisoner Maire, according to court documents.

"Specifically, Wright and Kechego repeatedly kicked and stomped Maire in the head, and Wright prevented corrections officers from intervening while Castro repeatedly stabbed Maire," according to the Department of Justice. "Wright, along with his two co-defendants, then worked together to throw Maire’s body down a flight of stairs. Maire died from multiple stab wounds (28 total) and blunt force trauma to the head."

The murder case was investigated by FBI agents.

Court cases for the two other co-defendants are pending.

U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison said in a statement, "Deterring violence inside prisons will always be a priority of this office. Senseless acts of violence that jeopardize the safety of employees and inmates of the Bureau of Prisons will be aggressively prosecuted."

Wright – nicknamed "Creeper" – was convicted of robbing banks in July 2018.

Maire – a married father of two from New York – was sentenced to prison for crimes committed when he was the reported leader of an international child porn ring. Maire and his cohorts allegedly targeted vulnerable teenage girls on the internet to perform sex acts online. For five years, the nine child sex abusers pretended to be teenage boys online to befriend young, lonely girls, according to prosecutors.

The child porn ring members manipulated teen girls into undressing and performing sex acts online and even convinced some of the victims to cut themselves while the sexual predators watched from online video chat rooms. The child sexual abuse group reportedly shared the videos among the members. The child porn ring reportedly exploited more than 100 teenage girls in the United States and Canada, ages 10 to 17, before being busted by the FBI in 2017.

The Detroit Free Press reported in February, "At their sentencing hearings, the defendants came face to face with some of their still-traumatized victims, who persuaded a judge to lock the men up for decades for robbing their innocence and trust, and for destroying their childhoods."

One victim told the judge, "Thinking back to those days causes me to cry myself to sleep, wondering when the monsters will stop haunting me."