Police: Ferndale father had thousands of child porn images on computers

A woman waits until she and her kids have safely moved out of the house before turning in her ex-husband, who is facing serious charges after what he showed her on his computer.

David Ankrom works on computers for a living but it's what he did off the job that has him facing six felonies and possibly several years behind bars.

"More than a thousand photos of children in the true sense of the word, children," said Sgt. Baron Brown, Ferndale police.

Ankrom, 46, of Ferndale, is facing several charges of possession of child pornography after police say thousands of sexual images of children were found on multiple computers inside his house.

It was his own wife who first alerted authorities about the disturbing photos back in November of 2015.

"At some point he showed her photos and she was not interested in looking at them," Brown said.

We're told the mother of two decided to move out of Ankrom's Ferndale house on Silman Street and make sure her children were safe, before she came forward with the disturbing claims.

But it would take detectives more than a year to analyze the evidence and prosecute this case because of a backlog at the Oakland County forensic computer crime lab.

"The scary thing is the computer that belongs to Mr. Ankrom isn't the only one out there," Brown said. "There are stacks of computers up at Oakland County forensic laboratory that need to be looked into. It just takes a while to look into a computer."

Police say the images found on Ankrom's computer were pictures and videos of girls estimated to be 8 to 10 years old.

At this point, investigators don't believe the suspect harmed or abused his own children and are hopeful they were able to stop him before he was able to victimize anyone else.

"The fear that police would have is that the compulsion that leads people to look at sexually explicit material," Brown said. "Leads to another step."

Brown says that the detectives worked very hard on the case and credits very good police work. Ankrom was able to post bond and he is out awaiting trial.

FOX 2 went to his house, it appeared he was there but he did not come to the door to respond to the allegations.