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Sean Higgins, 32, of Palmyra committed the crimes in 2020 while serving as the youth pastor and music leader at Harbor Baptist Church in Hainesport, according to Burlington County Prosecutor LaChia L. Bradshaw.
He was also a teacher at the Harbor Baptist Academy, a private K-12 school that is housed in the same facility.
Higgins pleaded guilty earlier this year to four counts of child endangerment for each of the four victims.
None of the charges involved members of the church congregation or students at the school.
The investigation revealed that Higgins would adopt the persona of a teenage girl and utilize Snapchat and Instagram to begin a conversation with a juvenile male, introducing himself as Julie Miller.
After establishing a rapport, he would suggest that they trade photos. Higgins would then send pictures of an unidentified female teenager, Bradshaw said.
In return, Higgins would often receive nude photos that the victims took of themselves.
Immediately upon receiving those images, he would take a screenshot of the victim’s friends list.
Higgins would send that screenshot back to the victim and threaten to send the nude photos he had just received to the victim’s friends list unless the victim did exactly what Higgins demanded.
In most of the cases that were investigated, Higgins then demanded that his victims go into the bathroom at their residence and place the phone on the floor, or at an angle looking up, and would instruct the victims to masturbate or perform sexual acts on themselves. Higgins would record what was transpiring, Bradshaw said.
According to the videos made by Higgins that were obtained during the investigation, victims would often beg Higgins to be allowed to stop engaging in sexual conduct, but Higgins would demand that they complete his instructions, or face the consequences of having the recordings he was making of the incident be sent to their list of friends.
“The crimes committed by this defendant are among the cruelest, most depraved ever prosecuted by this office,” Bradshaw said. “Some of these victims contemplated suicide to get out from under the extreme anguish that accompanied the defendant’s debauched, unrelenting demands."
The investigation began in 2020 after a youth in Berks County, PA, contacted Snapchat and reported that he sent nude photos of himself to someone he believed to be an unknown female.
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