A Rockville man who collected and shared thousands of sexually explicit images and videos of children was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Wednesday.
Romeo Joseph Hillman, 29, pleaded guilty in U.S District Court in Greenbelt in January to distribution of child pornography after investigators found a total of 12,765 images and 600 videos of child pornography on a computer and cellphone that belonged to him. The images and videos showed children ranging in age from 3 to 13 years old, prosecutors said.
Hillman will be under lifetime supervision by authorities and must register as a sex offender after he’s released, according to the plea agreement.
Investigators determined at least 125 of the computer files contained images of children previously identified as victims of child pornography by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
An FBI task force first became aware of Hillman in October 2014, when an undercover FBI agent working as part of a task force downloaded 82 image and video files containing child pornography from a computer with an IP address connected to Hillman’s residence. In February 2015, police raided Hillman’s residence and seized two laptop computers, four USB drives and a cellphone, on which they found the additional explicit images and videos.
Prosecutors said Hillman used a file-sharing application as well as Skype to share and download the videos and pictures.
