Department of Public Safety officials arrested an ISU freshman suspected of having more than 7,000 images and three gigabytes of movies depicting child pornography on his campus computer early Thursday evening.

Jason Lighthall, 20, has been charged with 60 class D felony counts of promoting materials depicting sexual acts with minors and 100 serious misdemeanor counts of possessing child pornography after investigators found “images that clearly depict minors being subject to sexual acts,” said Cpt. Gene Deisinger.

Campus police officers entered Lighthall’s second-floor Welch Hall residence room on March 25 and seized a computer and storage disks, Deisinger said.

He said investigators have since spent the time sifting through a “large number of still images and moving pictures” to support the case.

Lighthall, freshman in aerospace engineering, was arrested at his parent’s home in Altoona, where officers seized more computer equipment, Deisinger said.

He said he is unsure how much longer the investigation will last.

It has been a “time intensive, laborious process . given the volume of data we’ve gone through and still have to go through,” Deisinger said.

Lighthall is suspected of allowing others to download or upload the pornographic images via the Internet, he said.

Deisinger said he does not know whether this case is connected to Operation Candyman, where dozens of people around the country have been accused of trading sexually explicit images of minors over the Internet.

Lighthall is currently being held in the Story County jail on $45,000 bond. He faces fines and/or jail time if convicted.

Deisinger said Lighthall will face a judge in a preliminary hearing sometime Friday.

He said he has never seen anything similar on the ISU campus.

“I’m certainly not aware of anything of this magnitude that we have been involved in before at Iowa State,” he said.