A former Stoneleigh-Burnham School employee has been sentenced to 26 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in New York to one count of producing child pornography.
Matthew Fisher, 52, of South Wales, New York, accepted a plea bargain in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York on Oct. 15, ending the legal saga for the five victims mentioned in the agreement. Fisher was arrested in November 2023 on suspicion of using a laptop owned by his employer, The Gow School, in South Wales, New York, to view images of minors engaged in sexual acts. He had previously worked at Stoneleigh-Burnham before leaving in the summer of 2013.
“We thoroughly reviewed our records and found no evidence of wrongdoing during their time with us,” Laurie Lambert, Stoneleigh-Burnham’s head of school, wrote in an email. “We remain committed to fostering a safe and supportive environment for all members of our community.”
Fisher apparently worked as the equestrian center liaison, athletic trainer and director of summer programs at Stoneleigh-Burnham when he was employed there for nearly 7½ years, according to a LinkedIn account.
According to court documents, there is no evidence that any of his victims were Gow School or Stoneleigh-Burnham students. He was working as The Gow School’s associate director of admissions until he was fired following his arrest, which The Buffalo News reported occurred at Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Nov. 12, 2023, upon Fisher’s return from a work trip to Singapore.
According to a criminal complaint filed by FBI Special Agent Justis W. Nelson, the agency, on or about Oct. 26, 2023, was notified by the law firm that represents The Gow School that an information technology (IT) employee became aware of potential child pornography on an internet storage account maintained by Fisher and owned by The Gow School. Nelson reported that Fisher turned in his school-issued laptop on or about Oct. 15 because the keyboard was not working properly.
The Gow School is a coed boarding and day school for students in fifth through 12th grade with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities.
Court documents state that the IT employee was working from home about a week later when he was notified of an alert on the laptop Fisher had turned in. The source of the threat notification was determined to be an update to the Tor internet browser, which conceals websites visited. The IT employee, deciding Tor was unsuitable for The Gow School’s computer network, attempted to delete Tor from the storage account and found two Microsoft Word documents containing internet links to a log-in screen depicting naked boys under age 10 performing sexual acts on one another.
According to Nelson, the IT employee closed the browser, copied the two Microsoft Word documents and two Excel documents to preserve his discovery, shut off the laptop, and moved the documents onto a thumb drive, which the FBI took custody of about two days later.
Nelson reported that he reviewed the contents and found links that led to child pornography webpages requiring log-in information.
He wrote that on or about Nov. 8, 2023, he was notified by the Western New York Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory that a search of the laptop yielded images of children engaged in sexual acts.
Additional images on the laptop appear to be from a covert camera displayed in a bedroom. According to court documents, there are timestamps ranging from January 2019 to September 2023. The images depict clothed boys in a bedroom believed to be on the campus of The Gow School.