Gary Samuel Cochran, a registered sex offender who
was among 55 men nabbed after a multi-agency probe into child pornography exchanged via peer-to-peer networks like Limewire, was sentenced Monday to 26 years in federal prison. The 53-year-old had agreed in September to a plea deal after federal agents revealed a search of Cochran's Huntington Beach home turned up video he produced of an 8-year-old girl having sex.
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The plea deal U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson in Los Angeles signed off on has Cochran getting out of the federal pen nine years earlier
than maximum and one year later than minimum sentencing guidelines
allow.
Convicted of child molestation in Orange County in
1991, Cochran was among seven men arrested one morning in August 2008 to cap the
investigation led by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) that used sophisticated programs to track down
computers on which child pornography was being stored and made available
to others via peer-to-peer networks.
Cochran pleaded guilty to a count of producing child pornography, admitting that he produced sexually
explicit videos of the 8-year-old while on a trip to the beach
with her family. The search of Cochran's home
uncovered hundreds of child porn videos, including images of the girl engaged in sex acts.
After completion of his
prison stretch, Cochran will be on supervised release for the rest of his
life.
Besides known sex offenders like Cochran, attorneys and law enforcement
officers were swept up in the raids that targeted 55 men in Orange,
Riverside, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Among those arrested was
48-year-old Eric David Lacey, who was living above a child day care center in Hollywood. He'd been previously featured on America's Most Wanted for a child porn case out of North Dakota.
Previous coverage:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.