A man from Lamesa has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for possessing sexually explicit photos of a 16-year-old girl who he allegedly bragged to his coworkers he’d had sex with.
U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton announced the sentence Friday in a news release.
Osbaldo Moreno, 21, pleaded guilty to receipt of child pornography in February, according to the release. The state also charged Moreno with two counts of sexual assault of a child. The latter cases are pending.
According to court documents, Moreno was charged in November after a coworker reported conversations with the defendant during which Moreno apparently bragged about engaging in sexual acts with the minor victim in various locations, including the workplace bathroom, breakroom, and parking lot.
As part of his plea, Moreno admitted that he began engaging in sexual activity with the girl when she was 15.
The victim told law enforcement that Moreno often requested nude photos and wanted her to drop out of school so they could have sex more often. According to the release, the child also said Moreno did not use protection “because he wanted to impregnate her.”
Moreno had several cell phones, on which law enforcement discovered numerous explicit text messages and more than 150 graphic images and videos of the victim.
Further investigation revealed texts in which he also threatened the girl, saying, “U need to chill or am going to rape u and u not going to be able to walk again.”
According to the Dallas County Sexual Assault Division, 51.1% of sexual assaults in the U.S. are committed by an intimate partner. In Texas, one in five women is sexually assaulted at some point.
According to the daily crime analytics dashboard, the City of Dallas is also victimized by sex-related crimes, with 117 reports of rape documented year-to-date during the first third of the year, a 10% increase compared to the same period in 2022.
Meanwhile, crime continues to plague the city as the Dallas Police Department faces a shortage of officers, as was recently reported by The Dallas Express. DPD currently has approximately 3,100 officers, a number Chief Eddie Garcia told The Dallas Express is “hundreds” fewer than what the department needs.
Crime is especially prevalent downtown, which some cities like Fort Worth have sought to address by dedicating a police unit or enlisting a private security company to patrol their city centers.