Randy Lee Young

Introduction

Randy Lee Young, a 40-year-old man from Pierce County, Washington, has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for attempted enticement of a minor and production of images of child sexual abuse — a term that captures both a botched meeting with someone he believed was offering her young daughters and a separate, completed pattern of abuse of a real 13-year-old. Young was arrested on November 16, 2024, after driving from his home to a meeting place in Marysville, Washington, where the person he had been texting turned out to be a law enforcement officer posing as a mother willing to hand over her 8- and 11-year-old daughters. U.S. District Judge Lauren King imposed the sentence at a hearing where she praised the real victim’s “truthfulness and assistance with law enforcement” and told her “the only blame here lies with Mr. Young and Mr. Young alone.”

Background Information

The conduct that sent Young to prison began online in October 2024, when he met a 13-year-old girl on the internet and began a course of communication that rapidly became sexual. Text messages later recovered by investigators showed the victim told Young her age — she was thirteen — before he traveled to her hometown in southwest Washington seven separate times in October and November 2024 and videotaped sex acts with her on those visits. Forensic review of his cell phone, which Young consented to after his arrest, turned up images of the sexual abuse of a minor that Young himself had produced, making the production count a documentation of his own conduct rather than a possession charge attached to someone else’s material.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Convicted and sentenced. Young pleaded guilty to attempted enticement of a minor and production of child sexual abuse material and was sentenced to 15 years in prison plus 20 years of supervised release.

While that abuse of the 13-year-old was underway, Young was simultaneously arranging what he believed would be access to two more children. Between November 8 and November 15, 2024, he exchanged text messages multiple times with a law enforcement officer posing as the mother of 8- and 11-year-old daughters who would provide them to him for sexual assaults. On November 16, 2024, Young drove from his residence in Pierce County to the proposed meeting location in Marysville — directly north of Seattle — where officers arrested him on arrival. He was held in the Snohomish County Jail until federal charges were filed, and he entered federal custody on April 24, 2025. Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd said afterward, “Mr. Young made his intentions clear while communicating with the undercover officer. Then when he was arrested law enforcement discovered a 13-year-old had already been victimized.”

At the sentencing hearing, prosecutors urged a 15-year term in writing, noting that “the defendant chatted with the undercover officer about his intentions for eight days before showing up to act on his desires” and that he was “provided opportunities to disengage and instead doubled down.” The government’s filing argued that “there are simply too many individuals wired to abuse children to ever eliminate child exploitation” and that would-be offenders must understand “the steep cost of acting on their deviant desires.” The mother of the 13-year-old delivered a victim statement that Judge King read into the record: “He stole more than her innocence. He stole her sense of safety, her ability to trust, and parts of a childhood that she cannot get back.” FBI Seattle Special Agent in Charge W. Mike Herrington said Young’s phone “contained videos of him actually abusing a child on multiple occasions.”

Public Reaction and Consequences

The sentence — 15 years in prison followed by a 20-year term of supervised release, imposed in late 2026 in U.S. District Court in Seattle — was announced by Acting U.S. Attorney Floyd’s office for the Western District of Washington, which framed it as deterrence: “The community is safer with this defendant off the street.” The case ran through the FBI Seattle Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force with assistance from the Renton Police Department, and was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Cecelia Gregson under the Justice Department’s Project Safe Childhood initiative. The structure of the case — a sting that caught him before he could act on the fictional children, layered on top of evidence that he had already abused a real one — made the sentence a rare instance where both the attempted and completed conduct were visible in a single proceeding.

Current Status

Young, 40, is serving his 15-year sentence, and Judge King ordered him to remain on supervised release for 20 years after his release from prison. A separate restitution hearing scheduled for February 2027 will determine the amount he owes his victim, leaving the financial component of the judgment open while the custodial component is fixed. The seven trips to southwest Washington, the videos he made of the abuse, and the eight days of text messages with the undercover officer are all established parts of the sentencing record, and the judge’s statement to the victim — that “today’s sentencing” should bring “some closure” — marked the court’s framing of the outcome as final for the criminal case.

Impact on Their Career/Life

At 40, Young begins a 15-year federal term that will carry him into his mid-fifties, followed by two decades of supervised release — one of the longest post-custody tails imposed in the district’s child-exploitation docket. His production conviction means the videos he made of the abuse are part of the record of his own crimes, and the restitution hearing in February 2027 will attach a court-ordered debt to whatever income he has after release. The sting’s paperwork — his own texts expressing his intentions — forecloses any claim of entrapment beyond the eight documented days in which he could have walked away and instead drove to Marysville. For the 13-year-old he abused, the sentence closes the prosecution with her abuser imprisoned until 2041.

Sources

• U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Washington, “Pierce County man sentenced to 15 years in prison for sex crimes involving minors,” November 4, 2026. source