State Police: Farmington Man Possessed Hundreds of Videos Depicting Child Pornography

A Farmington man accused of child pornography possession was arraigned in Hartford Superior Court last Tuesday. 

Karol Hernas, 65, hasn't pleaded yet to his charges of promoting a minor in an obscene performance and first-degree illegal possession of child pornography in connection to 2010 incidents, according to the state judicial website. A judge continued his case to Nov. 14. 

Pennsylvania state police "discovered a video of suspected child pornography being shared" on the Gnutella peer-to-peer file sharing network in June of 2010, the arrest warrant said. The IP address for a computer using the video traced back to Farmington, police determined using geo-location technology.

The Farmington computer was sharing at least two images and 57 videos, police said, and many matched past files that surfaced in child pornography investigations. State police downloaded a photo and two video files of suspected child pornography from the computer involving children ages 11 to 14.

While police initially found that the IP address traced back to Texas, AT&T confirmed in August of 2010 that the IP address was assigned to an account at the Hernas household in Farmington. 

Police got a search warrant and searched the home on Nov. 12. Hernas son translated his responses from Polish to English in interviews with police because Hernas was having trouble understanding them. He admitted to police that he downloaded pornography sometimes, looking for adult content, saving the files on a memory stick through Limewire to look at later on. He told police that some of the files came through as child pornography, but he was not seeking it. He said he would usually delete those files unless he forgot to do so.

Police seized 16 items from his home, including an Sandisk Cruzer four-gigabyte drive, Dell laptop and Dynex USB external hard drive.

State police received the report from the Division of Scientific Services' forensic laboratory analyzing the seized items in July of 2013.  Investigators found "nine videos of suspected child pornography on the Sandisk Cruzer drive, 68 videos "of suspected child pornography" on the computer and as many as 329 videos of possible child pornography on the external hard drive. That amounted to 11 images and 406 videos containing sexual content depicting "children between the ages of 3 and 14," but many of those were duplicate files, according to the arrest warrant. 

The court is awaiting Hernas' plea to the charges.