Former teacher's aide pleads guilty to child porn possession
A former teacher's aide at a Palatine school for special needs children pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and attempting to solicit underage girls, court records show.
Randall Scott Gilbert, 35, was sentenced to 30 months probation in exchange for his guilty plea to the class 3 felonies, court records show. Gilbert was also ordered to pay $1,379 in fines.
Prosecutors say Gilbert, who has no criminal background, posed as a 17-year-old boy in an attempt to meet underage girls in an online chat room in which he engaged in sexually explicit conversations.
During the course of an investigation by members of the state's attorney's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and Hoffman Estates police, authorities discovered Gilbert used online chat rooms to obtain images of child pornography, prosecutors said.
Authorities said at the time of Gilbert's arrest that there is no evidence the children depicted in the images found on his computer were children from the school where he worked.