Tucson teacher sentenced to 7-plus years in prison for child pornography
May 23, 2018, 4:25 AM
Math And Science Success Academy (Google Maps screenshot)
(Google Maps screenshot)
PHOENIX — A former Tucson middle-school teacher was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for distributing and possessing child pornography, the U.S. District Court in Arizona announced Tuesday.
Ryan Bono, a former language arts teacher at Math And Science Success Academy, was sentenced to 87 months in prison.
The sentencing came after Bono pleaded guilty to two counts of distributing child pornography, one count of possessing child pornography and one count of knowingly accessing child pornography.
The 37-year-old will serve a lifetime term of supervised release with stringent sex offender conditions, including that he register as a sex offender.
Bono was arrested in 2017 after an investigation found that he had been distributing sexually explicit images of children using file-sharing software.
Court documents showed that a search of Bono’s computers and storage revealed that he downloaded hundreds of images and more than 162 videos depicting “hardcore” sexual abuse of children, including images of bondage.
Bono had also stored multiple non-pornographic images of children, some of whom were later determined to be his students.
Some of the photos were of children playing soccer without their shirts on and others were of children at a waterpark. Some of the photos included Bono posing with the children.
Bono, according to court documents, admitted to being sexually attracted to some of his students. Prosecutors alleged that his choice of employment was “likely sexually motivated and self-serving.”
He also attempted to participate in a field trip to California after he was told he was not needed, even setting up an online crowd-sourcing campaign to raise money for the trip.
Court documents also found that Bono’s internet history included searches on how to adopt a child, how to find out of students were using Grindr (a smartphone application for gay and bisexual men), what the lowest age of consent in the world is, how to host refugees and whether a sports trainer could perform physicals.
Prosecutors had requested that Bono be sentenced to 235 months in prison, in part because the court found that he posed a danger by placing himself around children.
