A former Prince George’s County police sergeant was sentenced to more than four years in prison for buying and downloading images of child pornography onto his laptop computer, federal prosecutors said.
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U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. ordered 35-year-old David John Larose Jr. to spend 51 months in federal prison after he determined that Larose had lied during his testimony at his plea hearing and failed to accept responsibility for his conduct, prosecutors said. After pleading to the crimes in court, Larose recanted his story, saying he was coerced into the agreement by his attorney and the assistant U.S. attorney, but his new version fell apart during cross-examination, prosecutors said.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod Rosenstein said Larose was snagged through a national initiative to combat the “growing epidemic” of computer child sex crimes.
“One of the striking things we’ve found is that people from all walks of life, police, prosecutors, leaders of religious organizations, teachers and coaches, unfortunately, get involved in child pornography and child exploitation,” Rosenstein said. “It just flourishes through the Internet.”
Larose was a 12-year veteran patrol officer when he became the subject of a federal child pornography investigation into a criminal organization that offered monthly subscriptions to some of its more than 200 different commercial child exploitation Web sites, according to charging documents.
Larose’s personal e-mail and two credit cards popped up as being used to buy child pornography from the illegal Web sites. From October 2006 through April 2007, Larose paid to access illegal pornography Web sites, spending $79 a month per service, court filings said.
“It’s not just the downloading,” Rosenstein said. “He was actually funding the child pornography and child exploitation by paying for it.”
In March 2008, federal investigators searched a computer seized from Larose’s Lusby, Md., home, which revealed that Larose used his computer to download and save up to 150 images of child pornography, court filings said.
Larose, who was last assigned as a patrol officer in the Oxon Hill district, was fired from the police department in May as a result of the investigation, Prince George’s County police spokesman said.
When he gets out of prison, Larose will have to register as a sex offender.
