By JOHN BURNETT
By JOHN BURNETT
Tribune-Herald staff writer
A federal judge has sentenced a Hilo recording engineer and record producer to 25 years imprisonment on child pornography charges.
During sentencing on Monday, U.S. District Judge David Ezra said that 67-year-old Ronald Leroy Felts possessed “incredibly horrific images,” and added that Felts’ collection of child pornography plus his physical exploitation of a teenage girl represented “the perfect storm” of child sex offenders.
Ezra also ordered Felts to register as a sex offender in any state he lives or works upon his release from prison and to undergo sex offender treatment. Felts will also be subject to five years of supervised release, the federal equivalent of probation, when he gets out of prison.
In a deal with prosecutors, Felts pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving and possessing visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. In exchange for his guilty plea, a third count of the same offense was dropped.
Felts, who’s in custody at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center, is not accused of producing child pornography, only possession.
According to court documents, federal agents executed a search warrant on Felts’ Alae Street home on Sept. 20, 2007, and seized two computers and eight external hard drives.
“Five of the hard drives contained approximately 1.7 million images and 31,000 videos of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The images and videos included depictions of known child victims identified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” the plea agreement stated. The center’s officials told the FBI that Felts’ personal collection was the largest it had ever received.
Felts’ home was raided after an FBI investigation into a group of kiddie porn websites turned up PayPal records indicating that Felts had paid for access to a site called “Desired Angels,” had made two payments of $79.95, on Aug. 31, 2006, and May 8, 2007, and downloaded pictures and videos. Documents stated that Felts possessed digital files with sexually explicit “images depicting prepubescent minors, or minors under the age of 12 years” and “several images that portrayed sadistic or masochistic conduct, or other depictions of violence.”
Felts operated MSE Records and recording studio from his home. He’s the second East Hawaii record producer to be sentenced by the feds in the past 18 months for possessing kiddie porn. In December 2010, musician and producer Gregg Perry was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in a federal penitentiary on similar charges.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.