A Jamaica man faces up to seven years in prison after being indicted on more than 17,000 counts of allegedly downloading thousands of child porn pictures and videos, prosecutors announced.
Vishal Lalbeharry, 30, of 95th Avenue appeared on Queens Criminal Court on Jan. 14 for arraignment on a 17,725-count indictment charging him with promoting a sexual performance by a child as a sexually motivated felony, promoting a sexual performance by a child, possessing a sexual performance by a child and sexual misconduct.
According to Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, Lalbeharry allegedly downloaded the massive amount of depraved videos and images between March and April of 2018, stored upon four laptops, four cellphones and five hard drives that investigators seized from his home. Moreover, detectives also discovered 16 video recording showing Lalbeharry allegedly having sex with a dog.
“The images accumulated by [Lalbeharry] allegedly contained some of the most horrific ways imaginable to sexually abuse a child — even babies were defiled,” Brown said on Monday. “I cannot stress it enough, pictures and video of children being sexually abused is, for all intents and purposes, crime scene images. The children are real people and they must live with the scars on their bodies as well as in their memories forever.”
Prosecutors said that a detective of the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad discovered on March 27, 2018, an IP address linked to one of Lalbeharry’s computers which had allegedly downloaded 1,150 files containing pornographic images of children, some of whom were shown being sexually abused by men. Some of the victims in the images were as young as 6 months old.
After his arrest, Lalbeharry allegedly told law enforcement agents that, “while I was downloading regular porn, some images of child pornography were in the files” and that he had seen the images “by mistake.”
Brown said that Lalbeharry must return to court on April 22 for his next hearing; he faces up to seven years behind bars if convicted.
