Porter jury clears trucker of child porn

VALPARAISO — After about five hours deliberation Thursday, a jury found a truck driver not guilty of knowingly having a video of child pornography on a memory card found in his vehicle.

Luis A. Gomez, 37, of Elmhurst, N.Y., could have received up to three years in prison for Class D felony possession of child pornography if found guilty in the two-day trial.

After C.R. England trucking fired Gomez in October 2012, an employee cleaning out the cab stole one of the memory cards that were supposed to be boxed up with Gomez’s items and found the video after erasing a pornographic photo of an adult.

Defense attorney Clay Patton argued that the three pornographic files on the memory card were from one of the multiple people who sometimes rode with Gomez and used his phone as an Internet tether.

Patton said the memory card didn’t fit any of Gomez’s devices and that the erased photos of his family were from someone accidentally downloading those from Gomez’s device, then erasing them.