Brooksville man arrested after agents find thousands of abuse files

FDLE agents arrested a Brooksville man after a search of a Redfox Drive home turned up multiple hidden storage devices and, investigators say, thousands of child sexual abuse material files. The case began with online undercover work and ended with a search warrant, a forensic examination, and 15 felony counts tied to a single residence in Hernando County.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Paul Alois Wolaver, 62, was arrested on 14 counts of possession of child sexual abuse materials and one count of promotion of a sexual performance by a child. All of the charges are second-degree felonies. Wolaver was taken to the Hernando County Detention Center, where court records show bond was set at $30,000 before he was released the next day.

Investigators said the case started in March 2026 as part of a statewide initiative aimed at identifying people actively distributing child sexual abuse material. FDLE said agents used an undercover operation to find a device connected to Wolaver’s residence that was sharing files over a peer-to-peer network. A public writeup of the FDLE release says agents traced the IP address to Wolaver’s home and determined that several of the shared files included videos promoting the sexual performance of a minor.

Agents later made additional connections to the same device in April and downloaded more files that investigators determined were illegal. On June 10, FDLE executed a search warrant at the Brooksville home and reported finding multiple external hard drives and storage devices hidden in the garage. A forensic review allegedly turned up thousands of CSAM files across several devices, including material on a hard drive associated with tax records. According to the affidavit summarized in the reporting, some of the material depicted children being sexually abused as young as 3 years old.

The arrest also shows how these cases are being built in Hernando County and across Florida: online detection, undercover downloads, subpoenas, digital tracing, then a physical search and forensic analysis. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said its CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports in 2025, including 19,514,872 reports categorized as child pornography, a volume that helps explain why state and federal agencies keep devoting resources to online exploitation cases. Another Hernando County case this spring followed a similar path, beginning with a CyberTipline report and leading to charges against Brooksville resident Jildardo Reofrio.