A Woodhaven man will spend decades behind bars for possessing and sharing videos of children as young as 2 years old engaging in sexually explicit acts online, prosecutors announced Friday.
Diego Guerra, 41, was convicted of 19 counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and 30 counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child in June. He was sentenced to 21 to 63 years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender.
“This defendant partook in the vile act of sharing videos of children on the internet,” said acting District Attorney John M. Ryan. “These horrifying crimes should serve as reminder to all that the internet must be policed in order to prevent further instances of children being violated and degraded in the worst imaginable ways. The Court’s sentence is appropriate and hopefully serves as a deterrent to others who would engage in this despicable crime.”
According to trial testimony, on Jan. 5, 2017, law enforcement officers used an internet software tool to link Guerra’s IP address to a series of files containing images of child pornography uploaded to the peer-to-peer file-sharing network ARES. Detectives found that Guerra had shared several videos depicting children between the ages of 6 and 12 years old engaging in explicit sexual acts with adult men and other underage children. In some of the videos, children as young as 6 were seen being sexually assaulted by adult men, while others showed boys between the ages of 10 and 12 engaging in lewd sexual acts.
Charges say that on Jan. 19, 2017, authorities were able to obtain another video that Guerra shared on the peer-to-peer network. The 24-minute-long video showed a teenage boy performing a sexual act on a girl, who was believed to be between the ages of 6 and 8. The video also showed an adult man giving instructions to the boy as he continued to penetrate the child.
After obtaining this video, authorities subpoenaed records pertaining to the IP address associated with the account and it was subsequently determined that Guerra was the individual sharing the videos.
Police executed a search warrant at Guerra’s home on July 27, 2017. Once inside, authorities found a laptop in the bedroom. Guerra, who was arrested a few days later, admitted to owning a laptop, but claimed that he had only found it recently.
A forensic exam on the laptop found that Guerra had 60 additional images of children between the ages of 2 and 12 with their genitals exposed and engaging in lewd sexual acts. Pictures and video of Guerra were also found on the laptop and were uploaded in January 2017, the same time when the videos were being shared to the peer-to-peer network.
