Man gets 30 years for sexually abusing autistic child

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A South Florida man was sentenced Monday to 30 years behind bars after he confessed to making child pornography of an autistic boy. Ethan Alexander Concepcion, a Port St. Lucie resident, will also have to register as a sexual predator and be under supervised release for the rest of his life after his time in prison, federal court records show. Metadata from the images revealed that Concepcion likely abused the child on at least four occasions from March 2018 to January 2019, the United States Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida said Tuesday in a news release. The boy was 5 or 6 years old at the time, the office said.

Federal agents first got wind of the sexual abuse when Australian police contacted Homeland Security Investigations in mid-January to alert them that a man they were investigating for child abuse had received child porn from a person in Greenacres, a city in Palm Beach County. The man being investigated by Australian law enforcement had received eight videos and 23 photos showing a young boy engaging in sexually explicit conduct with a man about two years earlier.

In March, agents interviewed the boy’s mother, who was not named in the criminal complaint. She identified her son in an edited version of one of the sexual abuse images. She also told agents her son is on the autism spectrum disorder, and that he was “nonverbal.” Two days later, Concepcion tried to kill himself and was hospitalized. In an interview with agents hours after the incident, investigators say he admitted to using one of his email addresses to send pornographic photos and videos of the child and himself.