June 1 (UPI) -- A man in Texas was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he was found to have more than 35,000 child pornography files.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown sentenced Michael Crisp Jr., 33, to 210 months in jail and ordered him to pay a total of $136,500 in restitution to the victims, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.
"Crisp hoarded and traded files of child rape, suffering and trauma as if they were some kind of collectors' item -- to the order of tens of thousands," U.S. Attorney Alamdar Hamdani said in a statement. "Today's sentence underscores that consumers of child pornography can and will be held to account for how they fuel demand for more and more images of children suffering unspeakable sexual abuse."
The Justice Department said Crisp first came to the government's attention after he uploaded to his cloud storage account a nine-minute video of an adult woman sexually abusing a toddler.
During the investigation, officials found more than 29,000 images and 6,500 videos of child pornography on multiple devices. Some of the videos depicted children under the age of 5 in bondage.
Crisp pleaded guilty on March 31.
"Crisp took pleasure from thousands of images and videos depicting the sadistic sexual exploitation, torture and abuse of children, including infants and toddlers," FBI Special Agent James Smith said in a statement. "While today's sentence removes one sexual predator from children's lives, the FBI's work continues as there are many more like Crisp still out there."
