Welcome back to another depressing episode of Lubbock Men Doing Terrible Things. Today’s contestant is 32-year-old Mark Landreth, who just booked a 12-year, all-inclusive stay at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. His crime? Possessing child pornography, which he apparently thought was a great thing to handle via Snapchat. Because nothing says “criminal mastermind” quite like using an app famous for disappearing messages to trade evidence of disgusting felonies.
If you thought the crime was bad, wait until you look at how long it took the local legal system to sort this out. Authorities first received a cybertip about Landreth’s digital activities all the way back in 2021. Tech-savvy investigators managed to trace the IP address right back to Landreth’s phone, but because this is Lubbock, the wheels of justice ground along with agonizing slowness. He wasn’t even indicted until 2023, when a grand jury slapped him with 10 counts of child pornography.
Fast forward to mid-2026, and Judge William Eichman finally handed down a 12-year sentence after Landreth pleaded guilty to two of those counts. Don’t worry about Landreth serving the full dozen years behind fresh bars, though; our local legal sluggishness means he’s already racked up a casual 1,081 days of jail credit. That’s nearly three years of sitting around on the taxpayer’s dime before the gavel even dropped.
Who knew an app built for ephemeral dog-ear filters would end up handing someone a very permanent, very non-disappearing prison sentence?
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