Lancaster County Man Gets 20 Years for Fourth Conviction Involving Child Pornography

PHILADELPHIA—David Husmann, 53, of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, was sentenced today to 20 years in prison for possessing and distributing child pornography while on supervised release for possession of child pornography. On March 13, 2013, a federal jury found Husmann guilty of the latest charges—his fourth conviction for charges involving crimes against children with a fifth, unrelated, conviction.

Husmann was on supervised release from a 2005 conviction when, on January 26, 2011, his probation officer made an unannounced visit to the home of Husmann’s mother, where he was living at the time. As part of the conditions of his release, after serving his sentence for the 2005 conviction, computer monitoring software was installed on the computer Husmann used. The probation officer had received an alert from the monitoring software that indicated that Husmann had accessed pornographic websites and images and also provided the probation officer with static screen shots of the images. Upon entering Husmann’s basement bedroom, the probation officer found Husmann in the act of viewing child erotica.

Among the thousands of images in the defendant’s collection were those of children who were sexually abused and who had already been identified through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Their images have been distributed around the world through the Internet.

Husmann’s record shows he was first convicted of three counts of cruelty to animals in 1995. During the same time period that he committed that crime, he was also engaging in a pattern of sexual exploitation and abuse of young girls who were under his care as a house parent at the Hershey School in Dauphin County. Between September 1995 and March 1996, the defendant downloaded pornography onto a school computer and showed it to eight young girls who resided at that school and were under his care. He was also convicted of indecent assault on two of the girls. Husmann was sentenced and moved to Florida to serve out his probationary term on his second conviction, which required him to register as a sex offender. However, once he moved back to Lancaster County into his mother’s home in 2002, he failed to register. That resulted in a conviction for failure to register as a sex offender. He had been living with his mother, unregistered, for more than two years, again failing to register as a sex offender and becoming actively engaged in trading child pornography and purchasing memberships in child pornography websites. As a result, a search warrant was issued and the defendant was ultimately convicted in federal court of possession of child pornography. In August 2005, he was sentenced to 51 months’ incarceration, followed by three years’ supervised release. That was his fourth conviction. After his release from federal prison, and while still on supervised release, Husmann continued his crimes against children by trading and collecting the images and videos of children being sexually exploited that led to his conviction in this case.

In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence F. Stengel ordered Husmann to pay a fine in the amount of $2,000 and a $400 special assessment. Upon completion of his prison term, Husmann will be supervised by the United States Probation Department for the rest of his life.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella.