East County College Student Gets 10 Years for Child Pornography

A Spring Valley college student was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison for possessing child pornography.

Anthony Michael Gonzales, 23, pleaded guilty in December to a count of receiving images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

While handing down the custody term, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff also ordered Gonzales to serve five years of supervised release, pay $5,000 in restitution to a victim and register as a sex offender upon release from incarceration.

From October 2011 through March 2012, federal agents identified an Internet protocol address on a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that was trading in files suspected of containing child pornography, and tracked it to Gonzales' home, according to a complaint in the case.

Agents executed a search warrant on the residence and seized Gonzales' laptop computer, which had the user name "Metatron." A forensic examination uncovered roughly 170 videos and 22,300 images suspected of containing child pornography.

Reviewing a sampling of about 885 of the images, agents determined that six of them depicted bondage of children. There also were images involving children who appeared to be under 2 years old, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego.

One DVD had about 100 images of child pornography. At the time of his arrest, Gonzales also possessed a thumb drive that also contained child pornography, prosecutors said.