TYLER, Texas — The former mayor of Athens was sentenced to federal prison for trying to have sex with children online.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, James Monte Montgomery, 65, pleaded guilty to federal charges of sending obscene materials to a minor on Aug. 25, 2022. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Montgomery was arrested on June 3, 2021 after soliciting sex online with investigators posing as minors.
In June 2020, Montgomery started communicating by text message with a person he believed to be a 15-year-old girl. In the messages, Montgomery described sexually explicit acts that he wanted to perform on the child and offered to pay the child if she would meet him and have sex with him.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Tyler Field Office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, Collin County Sheriff’s Office, and the Department of Homeland Security-Homeland Security Investigations.