BROWNSVILLE, Texas -- The founder of a Texas cargo airline was
sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for federal child pornography
charges, after undercover officers posing as young boys said
they engaged him in explicit online sex chats.
Robert L. Hedrick was convicted May 21 of three charges. U.S.
District Judge Andrew Hanen sentenced Hedrick Wednesday in federal court
in Brownsville, Texas.
The 61-year-old founder of Pan American Airways was arrested last
year after undercover authorities in Wisconsin and Louisiana traced
sexually explicit chat-room exchanges to an online account registered to
him. Investigators said they later found 240,000 pornographic images including infants
saved on ten hard drives in his home.
Hedrick admitted he was sick and would never change.
Prosecutors presented evidence at trial tying Hedrick to the chats
with undercover officers posing as 7- and 10-year-old boys. Defense
attorneys denied it was Hedrick at the keyboard, trying to use the
Internet’s thin veil of anonymity to raise doubts among jurors, and
claimed he had a long list of enemies with the motivation and money to
set him up.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Violet LaTawn Warsaw told jurors that
Hedrick’s ultimate goal was to convince teenage boys to send him nude
photographs. To that end, he searched for them in Internet chat rooms,
began conversations that quickly turned sexually explicit and sent them
pornography.
Defense attorney Ed Stapleton said Hedrick plead guilty as “a matter of principle.”
Pan American Airways, a freight carrier, opened its operations in a
building that once belonged to the former passenger airline Pan American
World Airways, also known as Pan Am. Pan Am collapsed in 1991.
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