A former elementary school teacher in La Puente has been charged with two counts of receiving child pornography and two counts of possession, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said Friday.
Steven Pilar, 47, had been summoned to appear Friday in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles on an indictment returned to a federal grand jury. He had been charged in July and arrested earlier this month in Las Vegas, where he resides. At the time, he was ordered held without bail.
The indictment alleged that Pilar used BitTorrent, a digital file-sharing protocol, to knowingly receive more than 400 videos and images of child sexual abuse material in February and April 2020. At the time, Pilar was teaching at a La Puente elementary school; she no longer works there, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
“This defendant, whose prior work put him in a position of trust with children, is accused of participating in an underground marketplace that trades in the sexual exploitation of children,” Martin Estrada, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. “Protecting children from sexual predators is critical, and my office will be relentless in our efforts to punish those who commit these crimes.”
Pilar could face a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years in federal prison if convicted. The case was investigated by the FBI and the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.
