Former Lincoln cop dispatcher sentenced for possessing child porn
A former Lincoln special police officer and dispatcher was sentenced to five years in prison followed by five years of supervised police for possessing child pornography.
Spencer Hughes, 33, of Randolph — who also worked at one time as a hotel security guard, according to a badge found in his home during the investigation — had pleaded guilty Jan. 6 to one count of receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography involving a prepubescent minor or a minor who had not attained 12 years of age. He was arrested in October 2020.
Judge Denise J. Casper sentenced him in federal court this week.
The sentence was at the low end for federal guidelines, which stipulate a mandatory minimum sentence of five to 20 years in prison, five years to life of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000.
Like in the case of Stephanie Lak, the 37-year-old Roxbury former nanny who got three years in state prison when she pleaded guilty to child pornography charges in Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday, Hughes was actively trading child pornography on the Kik messaging app.
Hughes went by the name “trainreq” on the messaging service largely heralded for its anonymity, but that anonymity doesn’t extend to child pornography.
The company employs a technology called PhotoDNA, according to a case document, that scans images traded on through unique signatures — or a “hash” of each image — which it compares to signatures of known child pornography photos contained in a database.
If an image appears to be a match, the system files a report to the company’s “Law Enforcement Response Team,” which visually inspects the image and files a report to law enforcement if the image is indeed child pornography. In Hughes’ case, Kik was alerted to possible child pornography associated with his account on July 27, 2019, and they in turn alerted law enforcement two days later.
The attached image in the report depicts a young girl, roughly 9 to 11 years old, lying on the floor with her legs propped up on a chair, according to a court affidavit. Police used this as probable cause to track Hughes down by his IP address and then executed a search warrant on his Union Square townhome the morning of Oct. 13, 2020.
There, investigators found a 1-terabyte hard drive that contained at least 19 digital files — 10 still images and nine videos — depicting child pornography, according to the affidavit. All of the files depicted the same little girl performing sexual acts or poses in a child’s room with fanciful childhood decorations.
Subsequent thorough examination of Hughes’ electronic devices found more than 2,200 images and about 68 videos of child porn, according to the feds.