A retired Bridgeport High School athletic trainer was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to five counts of soliciting sex from a child online.
William Lawrence “Billy” Newsom, 62, was caught in an online sting in March 2024 sending sexually explicit messages to someone he thought was a 12-year-old girl and arranging to meet her for sex.
Newsom was caught by Alex Rosen of Predator Poachers, who uses adult decoys to track suspected pedophiles online then records their confessions and turns over evidence he collects to local authorities.
According to Rosen, Newsom also admitted to viewing child sexual abuse material showing victims as young as 6 years old.
Newsom was arrested in April 2024 after an investigation by the Bridgeport Police Department, the Wise County District Attorney’s Office, Texas Rangers, and the U.S. Secret Service’s forensic division.
A Wise County grand jury indicted Newsom in October 2024 on five counts of online solicitation of a minor under the age of 14, a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.
Newsom was a high school athletic trainer in the Bridgeport Independent School District for 20 years, from 1998 until he retired in 2018.
In May 2025, Newsom was indicted on separate charges of sexually assaulting a disabled student in 2002 and 2004, when he was an educator, but Rosen said those charges were later dropped.
“If it wasn’t for our initial investigation, none of this would have been uncovered,” said Rosen following Newsom’s 2025 arrest. “Public schools are infested, and we’re happy to help clean it up.”
On Monday, Rosen announced Newsom’s sentencing from outside the Wise County Courthouse.
“Thank God for our decoys, because this guy is obviously a sexual deviant, a sexual predator, and because of the awesome work of our decoys… he just got sentenced to 12 years,” said Rosen.
Newsom has held a lifetime Texas teaching certificate since 1985.
Rosen said several character witnesses testified on Newsom’s behalf, which he found concerning.
They’re like, “I never knew him to be like this. He would never do this again.”
But that’s the thing about child predators. That’s what makes them scary, because they’re not your typical criminal that’s like violent or this or that. Some of them are, but he blended in so well for all of this time.
“Thanks to Predator Poachers, God bless Predator Poachers, he was brought to light,” added Rosen.
In 2023, Rosen and Predator Poachers caught Judson ISD middle school teacher Mark Mallow in a sex solicitation sting and provided evidence that secured a sentence of 131 years.
In just the past few years, hundreds of Texas educators have been accused of sex crimes involving students and other children, and thousands of educator sexual misconduct complaints have been reported to the Texas Education Agency.
The TEA’s Educator Misconduct Reporting Dashboard shows the agency is currently investigating more than 3,000 sexual misconduct complaints and opening an average of 250 new cases each month.
