A Long Island City man has been arrested for allegedly promoting a sexual performance and sharing thousands of photos and videos of children being sexually abused by adults, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Dodelyn Vertilus, 40, was arraigned on March 27 on 983 counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child as a sexually motivated felony and 2,218 counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child. He is currently being held on $50,000 cash bail and is due to return to court on June 27.
If convicted, Vertilus faces up to seven years in prison.
“The defendant in this case is alleged to have accumulated a vile collection of children being sexually abused by adults,” said Chief Assistant John M. Ryan. “The photos and videos are in fact crime scene images where youngsters are violated in the most horrific ways. This defendant allegedly kept the demand for these computer files going by collecting and sharing this content.”
According to charges, on July 18, 2017, a New York State Police investigator was using law enforcement software designed to search and identify individuals, via their Internet Protocol address, who are offering to distribute child sexual abuse material. The software detected that an IP address that allegedly belonged to an internet account at Vertilus’s home had been sharing files on a peer to peer network.
After establishing a direct connection with the computer, the investigator found that between July 18, 2017, and Sept. 13, 2017, the IP address had downloaded a total of 983 images and videos, all of which depicted child sexual abuse, on 17 separate occasions. The files had titles such as “Gold 3yo” and depicted children as young as 3 years old being sexually abused by adult men or being forced to pose in a lewd manner.
Charges say that on Oct. 6, 2017, police executed a court-authorized search warrant of Vertilus’s house and recovered numerous electronic devices. A forensic analysis allegedly found that Vertilus had a total of photo and video 2,218 files on on his laptop, his cellphone and seven thumb drives which all contained child sexual abuse material. The collection allegedly depicted children under 12 years old being sexually abused by adults.
Vertilus allegedly told police, in sum and circumstance, that “I have child pornography on the computer and I downloaded it to view it.”
The material in Vertilus’s alleged collection will be sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Child Victim Identification Program to ascertain which of the children in this material have been identified and saved by law enforcement.
