On Friday morning, we reported on FBI agents and Seattle Police searching a house in Gatewood but at the time got no answers from authorities as to why. Today, we know what it was about. The owner of the house, 41-year-old Eric L. Halgren, has been charged by federal prosecutors with distribution of child pornography and attempted enticement of a minor. After a tip from a commenter about an Instagram post hinting at the case – with a surname we recognized from research we did the day of the raid – we obtained the federal charging documents this morning through the local U.S. Department of Justice office. Federal prosecutors allege that Halgren communicated with an undercover agent he thought was a woman with an 11-year-old daughter and was arranging to fly to Salt Lake City to meet them. The last contact was Monday of last week; the charging documents say agents and officers went to his house with a search warrant Friday morning, and that he first “slammed the door in agents’ faces and utilized the opportunity to destroy his cellular phone.” Agents then “were able to break down the front door and arrest Halgren.” Prosecutors say he admitted to using an app to send child sexual-abuse material to the undercover agent; that’s at the heart of the distribution charge. The charging documents also say investigators matched him to a similar communication in 2022, with an undercover agent posing as a 19-year-old with a 12-year-old sister in San Francisco, allegedly offering to fly the agent to Seattle to “watch little girls at the park beach or pool …” The charging documents have pages of far more explicit details, which we will not summarize here. Halgren is currently in jail, at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac. He is scheduled for a detention hearing tomorrow.