Hoffman Estates man gets prison for child porn

A Hoffman Estates man who had one of the largest and most violent collections of child pornography the Chicago FBI office has ever seen was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison this week.

Donald R. Peppers, 36, pleaded guilty in August to manufacturing, transporting and possessing child pornography, including a video of himself sexually molesting a 1-year-old boy he was baby-sitting in Elgin.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Hibbler sentenced Peppers to 27 years in jail, saying he must serve at least 85 percent of it before he's eligible for release.

“This was a terrible case. This defendant's conduct was extraordinary in many ways,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Porter, one of the prosecutors. “I told the judge he had the largest and most violent collection of child pornography images and videos that we've ever seen in the Chicago FBI bureau.”

Peppers' attorney was not immediately availabe for comment.

Prosecutors said Peppers, using an online profile name “illinoisdonboy31,” communicated with others online about sexually molesting children, including infants, and created and traded images of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

“These images are indelible. You don't forget them,” Porter said.

After the FBI's Innocent Images Task Force in Virginia identified Peppers as a possible distributor of child pornography, the FBI and Hoffman Estates police searched his condominium and found hundreds of thousands of images and video of child pornography, which he had stored on different computer hard drives.

According to court documents, Peppers began communicating with an undercover agent in an Internet chat room in May 2009, and eventually sent the agent video files depicting the sexual molestation of children, including one in which Peppers himself molested the victim.

Peppers was arrested by FBI agents in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June 2009, where he was traveling for business.