Former Riverhead teacher sentenced to 3 years for exploiting minors online
A former Riverhead High School teacher and soccer coach was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday for sexually exploiting girls online in Suffolk County.
Ryan McCaffery, 38, of Ridge, posed as a teenager to solicit nude pictures from girls on Snapchat and shared child pornography on another messaging app.
“Adults have a responsibility to protect children, not expose them to sexually explicit material,” District Attorney Ray Tierney said. “The defendant’s conduct was deeply disturbing and wholly unacceptable. Children should never have to navigate this kind of exploitation or have their innocence stolen by an adult’s actions.”
Mr. McCaffery — who was hired by the district in 2021 — worked as a social studies teacher and junior varsity boys soccer coach at Riverhead High. He resigned Feb. 5, 2025, citing personal reasons.
He was arrested on May 12, 2025, and pleaded guilty last month to two counts of disseminating indecent material to minors in the first degree as sexually motivated felonies, both class D felonies, and one count of endangering the welfare of a child, a class A misdemeanor.
Mr. McCaffery admitted to soliciting nude images from girls and sending explicit images of himself to the underage victims.
His sentence will be followed by five years of post-release supervision. He also received a five-year sentence in Bergen County, N.J., and will serve the terms concurrently.
“This sentence holds the defendant accountable for conduct that has no place in our community,” Mr. Tierney said.
According to court documents and the defendant’s admissions during his guilty plea allocution, on Nov. 4, 2024, the New York State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone had shared child sexual abuse material on Kik, a messaging app.
According to the district attorney’s office, state police searched Mr. McCaffery’s home on Jan. 17, 2025, and seized several electronic devices. A digital forensic analysis of the devices revealed that Mr. McCaffery had been posing as a teenage boy and messaging multiple girls on Snapchat under the name “c_chambers77” between Dec. 2024 and Jan. 2025.
Officials said Mr. McCaffery had “quick-added” hundreds of random accounts to communicate with girls, sending images of his exposed genitals and requesting nude images from the minors. McCaffery had also attempted to view and purchase additional sexual abuse images and videos and shared at least one such video with another user on Kik.
