A former student was sentenced to nearly six years in prison after pleading guilty to secretly recording women in bathrooms at American University in D.C. and possessing more than a thousand images depicting sometimes violent child sexual abuse.
Judge Reggie B. Walton on Wednesday sentenced 21-year-old Kyle Blanco, of Orlando, to 71 months in a federal prison after he pleaded guilty last August to possession of child pornography and voyeurism. Blanco will be on supervised release for 10 years after his prison term, and he has to pay $5,000 to one of the victims identified in his computer files.
Court documents showed that on March 30, 2022, while attending American University as a political science student, Blanco was spotted secretly recording a female student from an adjacent stall in a gender-neutral bathroom on the campus. The victim reported the incident to university police. Investigators obtained a search warrant of his dorm room days later.
Police took his iPhone and laptop, but court documents said that Blanco wiped his phone clean remotely before authorities could search it. Prosecutors say this was an effort to block the investigation.
Investigators, however, found on his laptop evidence of numerous other voyeurism offenses at the university, as well as more than 1,000 media files containing child sexual abuse images. Police said some of the files were violent sexual-related images.
Federal officials said after his arrest and initial court appearance, Blanco was granted a pretrial, personal recognizance release, which he violated just a week later by downloading an app frequently used to access child pornography anonymously and then by clearing the web history on his phone.
Authorities ordered him to be arrested, and he surrendered to the U.S. Marshals in Orlando on June 9, 2023. He has been in custody since that time.
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