FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A Broward County armed services veteran is facing jail time on some very serious charges.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 49-year-old Edgar Ali Cerda of Cooper City was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison followed by 15 years of supervised release following his conviction on child pornography charges.
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Cerda, who is a former lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Army, was arrested in March of 2021 after officers searched his electronic devices and found “multiple images and videos depicting sexual exploitation of children under 12 years of age, with one victim as young as two years old,” per a release from the DOJ.
According to a federal criminal complaint, authorities received a tip from messaging app Kik that Cerda was sharing sexual abuse videos involving children on the platform.
The complaint states that Cerda claimed he was only sharing material in Kik chat groups for around two months because he said it was “something new” and said he “deleted everything when it became too much and the videos were too young.”
He pleaded guilty in a Fort Lauderdale federal courtroom in December.