By Kelsey Durham
A Flushing man who pleaded guilty earlier this year to promoting child pornography was sentenced last week to serve two to six years in prison, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
The DA’s office said Mauricio Gil, 50, was sentenced July 10 in Queens Supreme Court after admitting his role in a peer-to-peer computer network that allowed files containing sexual images of children to be distributed on the Internet.
Gil pleaded guilty at a March 7 arraignment to promoting a sexual performance by a child and had been in police custody since then, according to the DA.
The DA said police executed a search warrant at Gil’s home on Parsons Boulevard in July 2013 and found two laptops and 13 CDs along with external storage media, cellphones and cameras, digital and video, that were later discovered by a forensics team to contain more than 900 videos of child sexual abuse.
The DA’s office said many of the videos were downloaded using peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
An investigation conducted by the NYPD’s Major Case Squad Vice Enforcement Division revealed that Gil also installed video cameras in bathrooms of homes where families he knew lived, according to the DA, and later saved the recordings on CDs. The videos contained both adults and children, the DA said.
“This case clearly illustrates the dark side of the Internet, which aids in fueling the deviant behavior of sexual predators by allowing them to share disturbing videos of young children being sexually abused through their computers,” Brown said in a news release. “What they fail to realize or most likely choose to ignore, and what the public must remember, is that these images are, for all intents and purposes, crime scene photos as they depict actual children being cruelly victimized both physically and emotionally and who will have to carry the painful memory of that which occurred to them for the rest of their lives.”
Gil was sentenced by acting Supreme Court Justice Dorothy Chin-Brandt. Brown said a sex offender registration act hearing will be held prior to Gil’s eventual release from prison to determine his level of threat to society.
“The sentence to be meted out by the court is more than warranted,” he said.
Reach reporter Kelsey Durham at 718-260-4573 or by e-mail at kdurham@cnglocal.com.
