Christina Marie Hernandez is known for posting many photos and videos of her colorful nail designs on TikTok.
Hialeah police say those images helped identify her as the person who uploaded over a dozen child pornography files to the messaging app KIK.
Hernandez, 29, was arrested at her home in Hialeah Thursday on 13 counts of possessing child-porn images. She was booked into Miami-Dade jail.
At the time of her arrest, Hernandez was confronted with the illegal videos, and “she admitted to knowingly downloading and disseminating child pornography over the Internet.” Hernandez also admitted to “requesting specific” child porn from other Internet users, according to the arrest report.
KIK is a free messaging app with chat rooms that have been used to exchange child porn images in many cases in South Florida and across the country. In April a Miami-Dade police officer was arrested for trading explicit images on KIK.
A cyber tip prompted Hialeah police detectives to focus on the KIK uploads and an IP address registered to Hernandez’s phone. According to the arrest report, The 13 videos she had uploaded depicted girls between the ages of 5 and 14 being sexually abused.
Police found that the KIK account registered to Hernandez featured child porn images, as well as explicit selfies that featured a woman’s distinct nail designs: white flowers with white petals and pink, blue, yellow, and green lines, court records show.
Detectives turned to other social media outlets to verify it was her account. Her public TikTok account showed her “very distinctive nail designs with different themes including diamonds.”
Based in part on the TikTok evidence, a search warrant was issued to gain access to her private Instagram account which featured many of the same selfies found on the KIK account. The Instagram account also featured two images of the distinctive nail designs found on the KIK account, which were “co-mingled with child pornography,” according to records.
Those distinct nail photos were uploaded “within the same time frame” that the child porn was uploaded, police say.
