A man from McKinney will spend 40 years in prison after being convicted of sharing sexually explicit images of underage children online.
Collin County District Attorney Greg Wills said Enrique Esquivel-Mesen, 48, was caught in March 2021 by undercover officers on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network.
Esquivel-Mesen was promoting his own collection of thousands of videos and images of child pornography. After police searched his home in Wylie, they found a computer with more than 5,000 explicit images and videos. Esquivel-Mesen confessed and was arrested.
“Child predators who seek out images and videos of child pornography on these platforms and then also make it available to other child predators should know that Collin County law enforcement is always watching, and my office stands ready to prosecute to the maximum extent of the law,” Willis said in a news release.
Prosecutors presented evidence that Esquivel-Mesen had set up a hidden camera in a child’s bedroom at his home. This evidence was presented during the punishment phase of the trial.
Convictions for a federal child pornography offense can carry a substantial amount of prison time. A person convicted of knowingly possessing child pornography can be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison if the minor depicted in the image is under the age of 12. If the convicted person has previous convictions, the sentences can be longer.
Jurors found Esquivel-Mesen guilty on two counts of possession with the intent to promote child pornography. They gave him the maximum: a 20-year sentence for each charge.
He will serve two additional 10-year sentences for child porn charges concurrently.
U.S. law enforcement agencies like the FBI use modified BitTorrent accounts and trackers to detect online child predators and child pornography distributors. The undercover agents load known child porn torrent links to track IPs, catching people who sell and share child porn.
