Former Betrayal drummer Tony Ramirez has been arrested for possession of child pornography. The group have officially commented on his arrest with the below statement:
“We just wanted to address everything going on with Tony. First, I want to say how shocked and disappointed we are about the allegations in the news regarding him. This is something that we would have never expected to hear about him. With that being said, Tony has not been a member of Betrayal for over two years. He had some unfortunate events happen in his life that did not allow him to commit full time and be a member of this band. If you follow us, you would notice that Tony hasn’t been in our promo pictures or on tour with us in quite some time. We sincerely hope these alegations prove to be false, but regardless, this is something that we do not take lightly and something that shouldn’t be reflected upon Betrayal.”
According to The Columbian, Ramirez was arrested on July 25th in Vancouver, WA. He was found to have uploaded sexually explicit images of minors aged 6-12 engaged in sexually explicit situations with adult males. Google Inc. reported the upload of the images to their servers to the authorities. As it turns out, Ramirez had saved the images to his email account so he could “access them at a later time.”
Ramirez was arraigned on a litany of charges on August 08th, including:
Two counts of first-degree possession of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
One count of second-degree possession of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
Two counts of first-degree dealing of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
One count of second-degree dealing of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
Two counts of first-degree viewing of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
One count of second-degree viewing of images depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
He is next expected to appear in court for a hearing in October and is being held on $25,000 bail.