Former school janitor pleads guilty on child porn charge
David Anaya Garcia, 32, of Las Cruces, pleaded guilty today in federal court to a federal child pornography charge. At the time he committed the crime, Garcia was employed as a janitor at Mesilla Park Elementary.
A spokeswoman with the Las Cruces Public Schools District told ABC-7’s New Mexico Mobile Newsroom Anaya Garcia worked overnight. Students were present at school during the final hour of his shift, the spokeswoman added.
Garcia was arrested in July 2015, on a criminal complaint charging him with distribution of child pornography and possession of child pornography.
According to the complaint, Homeland Security Investigations initiated the federal investigation leading to Garcia’s arrest in June 2015, after state investigators revealed an IP address subscribed to Garcia’s residential address was being used to download child pornography.
The Las Cruces Police Department and HSI arrested Garcia and executed a federal search warrant at his home on July 1, 2015.
Garcia was indicted on Sept. 16, 2015, and charged with distributing child pornography on March 26, 2015, receiving child pornography from March 2015 through April 2015, and possessing child pornography on July 1, 2015.
Monday, Garcia pled guilty to receipt and distribution of child pornography and admitted that between March 12, 2015 and April 30, 2015, he distributed child pornography through file-sharing software that allowed others to download the images and videos he saved to a shared folder.
Garcia further admitted that on July 2, 2015, agents from HSI executed a search warrant on his home where they seized an HP Pavilion laptop containing five images and 88 videos depicting child pornography and a thumb-drive containing 56 images and 55 videos depicting child pornography.
At sentencing, Garcia faces a statutory mandatory minimum penalty of five years and a maximum of 20 years in federal prison followed by not less than five years of supervised release. Garcia will also be required to register as a sex offender.
