Well the relevant thing here is that he still had the pictures on his computer. Maybe he was taking pictures of 15 year olds when he was 14 or whatever, but they arrested a 28 year old man whose hard drive was full of images of people that are at most 17 years old.
This is a computer guy. Nobody would be surprised if he had spare hardware lying around from as far back as the 90s. If he just quick-formatted a bunch of spare drives and tossed them on a shelf years ago any forensics software would find what was on them before he formatted them. Considering that he's been collecting pictures since he was 14 I think it would be hard not to get him for possession if he's a hardware pack-rat.
That's a good point. I would probably forget about old drives as well - I thought they found the pictures on an active drive but realise now that this was a baseless assumption.
To be clear, I mean that the the way US laws are enforced, to the best of my knowledge, being underage yourself doesn't mean you are off the hook for having underage material.
I'd be interested to learn if this isn't the case.
This makes him sound like a pedophile, but given that he created it at 14, he could watch "children" older than himself.