Former UK student to be sentenced for having more than 4,000 child porn videos

A former University of Kentucky student will be sentenced in September for receiving and possessing thousands of child pornography videos, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A jury convicted Erik A. Hentzen, 26, Wednesday in U.S. District Court. Hentzen was discovered when authorities traced numerous online child pornography videos to his laptop, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

It took investigators two warrants to find Hentzen because he used another tenant's unsecured wireless router, court records said. When investigators first traced Hentzen's Internet protocol address, it led them to tenants living two floors below Hentzen.

When they executed a second search warrant in Hentzen's apartment in downtown Lexington on March 23, 2013, authorities found what investigator Tom Bell called "the largest collection of computer equipment" he'd seen in 200-plus warrants, according to federal court records.

The computers were found to contain more than 4,000 videos depicting child pornography, 66 of which were violent, according to court records. In addition, 11,959 other files were discovered when authorities used software to restore previously deleted material.

In total, Hentzen downloaded thousands of files from May 2012 to March 2013 that "depicted prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit conduct," the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

A total of 17 terabytes of data was examined from Hentzen's computers, according to court records. According to Bell, the entire printed works of the Library of Congress would fit on about 16 terabytes, court records show.

Both of the charges for which Hentzen was convicted carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Hentzen is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 15.

This story was originally published June 20, 2014 at 11:44 AM with the headline "Former UK student to be sentenced for having more than 4,000 child porn videos ."