A federal judge sentenced a former Dyer seminary school marketing executive to 15 years Monday for child pornography.
Michael Deckinga, 42, pleaded guilty in January to distribution of child pornography.
After prison, he will have to serve another 15 years on supervised release and pay $50,000 in restitution to victims. Federal law requires inmates to serve 85% of their sentence with good behavior.
It was a “very challenging case,” U.S. District Judge Philip Simon said. Deckinga had a “compulsion” and lived an “inexplicable dual life.”
As a self-proclaimed Christian with a wife and seven children, he lived an outwardly normal life in Dyer while working for Mid America Reformed Seminary for nearly a decade.
Federal prosecutors alleged he traded child porn online on the Kik app for at least five years and had sexually explicit conversations online with at least a dozen minors.
The child pornography victims — at least one who was now a young adult — could never really escape what happened to them, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Morgan said.
The courtroom was packed — not only with Deckinga’s friends and family, but neighbors who turned against him after his arrest.
Two neighbors had planned to speak in court during the hearing, but that plan was scuttled after objections from Deckinga’s defense lawyer Peter Boyles, since they weren’t victims. Since Boyles wasn’t immediately prepared to cross-examine them, which would have rescheduled the hearing, Morgan tabled their testimony.
After the hearing, the men said they saw a “convoy” of police cars on the block as they took children to the bus stop on the first day of school back in August.
Deckinga was “in his front yard, sipping coffee” and calmly talking to the police, said Andre Mikrut, who said he didn’t know Deckinga well, and helped organize a letter-writing campaign to federal court. “It didn’t look like someone who blew up his family.”
The other man said he was “disgusted” after seeing others write support letters for Deckinga, which motivated him to speak out. He wrote in prepared remarks that Deckinga was a “narcissist” and “con man” — to his family most of all.
Mikrut said Tuesday he was pleased with the verdict, hopeful that it would protect Deckinga from other kids. Simon, he said, saw through the man’s “crocodile tears.”
Deckinga “can obviously turn this persona on-and-off,” he said.
During the hearing, Boyles noted some who wrote letters for Deckinga later reached out to him after they got backlash when their support was publicized on social media. At least one person asked to take the letters offline, which he said he couldn’t do.
In 32 years as an attorney, Boyles said he had “never seen this.”
About a half-dozen people effectively withdrew their support letters. One woman wrote she talked about the “Mike she knew” in the past, but as a “mother myself” loathed child sexual abuse.
Boyles argued Deckinga was a “complicated sum of very different things.” He didn’t make money off child porn. He never molested a child, nor forced anyone to take nude pictures or videos. There was no evidence in a chat that the people he explicitly communicated with were actually minors.
He asked for the minimum, which was five years.
Deckinga, who spoke at length in court, said he and pornography “have grown up together.” Over time, he became an “expert,” he thought, of hiding his habit.
He first saw pornography on a school bus at age 12. He claimed his usage particularly expanded on work trips to Florida and Canada. He used the social media app Kik to “see if a kind of community existed.”
“My crimes were not victimless,” he said.
He also apologized to his wife and children. His arrest was the “end of my double life.”
“I will never commit these crimes again,” he told Simon.
Morgan retorted several of his statements.
It was “nearly impossible” to make sure he was cut off from the internet with seven children at home, she said.
One of the dozen or so victims said she had to “relive the most horrific part of my childhood,” Morgan said, quoting her. Deckinga should be judged for his actions when he thought “no one was watching,” the prosecutor argued.
Part of the problem for investigators was that Kik chats were only preserved for 30 days. They don’t know if he was talking explicitly to minors, but he thought he was, she said.
Authorities alleged Deckinga’s actions went back at least to September 2020 when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) got their first “CyberTip” from a Kik account.
Morgan told Simon that Deckinga was in Ottawa, Canada when NCMEC got that tip. So, it was sent to the police there, not to Indiana.
“When we did get (notifications of other child pornography), we acted on it quickly,” she said.
Eventually, Deckinga had up to 10 accounts, as the social media service attempted to play whack-a-mole. Federal charges span from November 2024 to May 2025.
The federal investigation started after NCMEC got a slew of cybertips — or online flags — in June 2025.
Investigators found more than 600 images — with some including babies and toddlers “portrayed sadistic or masochistic conduct or other depictions of violence,” Morgan wrote. Deckinga himself uploaded pictures of himself partially nude in a vehicle.
The victims got a “life sentence of their own” often with harassment for both them and their families, or unfounded reports sent to child protective services, Morgan said in court.
He was a “master manipulator,” she said.
Morgan asked for 19 years.
Simon said there were a lot of factors to weigh, but Deckinga’s actions were “vile,” “demeaning,” and “awful.”
The chats paint a picture of predatory behavior — “what was going on in your mind,” he said. It was clear Deckinga strongly suspected they were kids.
In some chats, Deckinga spoke in sexual terms about his own nieces. One user asked if he “spied” on them.
“No,” he wrote. “But, pool parties are fun.”
That “hit me hard,” the judge said.
