An Oklahoma man who transported child pornography when he moved from Ashdown, Ark., in 2013 was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday by a federal judge in Texarkana.
Patrick Kellam, 43, was in court for sentencing Thursday with Texarkana attorney John Pickett at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Susan Hickey in the Western District of Arkansas, Texarkana Division. Kellam previously entered a plea of guilty at a hearing in May.
Kellam, who has no prior criminal record, had been free on a $5,000 unsecured appearance bond. He was taken into custody Thursday by federal marshals immediately following the sentencing.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Candace Taylor told the court Kellam possessed a large cache of still images and videos of young children being brutally sexually assaulted.
Kellam’s plea agreement includes forfeiture of a Verizon phone, Samsung tablet and Dell laptop on which pornography was found. Kellam came to the attention of Arkansas State Police investigators in 2013 when they were contacted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NCMEC was alerted by Verizon in March 2013 that Kellam was attempting to upload child porn to a cloud-based storage device, according to court records. Other services, including Google and Yahoo, contacted NCMEC too.
When state police investigators contacted Homeland Security about Kellam’s online activities, Homeland Security went looking for him at his last address in Ashdown and learned he had moved to Broken Bow. In June 2015, Kellam admitted he had been downloading child pornography for some time.
Kellam admitted some of the images he kept involved infants being sexually exploited and that at least one involved a pre-pubescent girl between the ages of 6 and 9 years being sodomized by a grown man.
Upon his release from federal prison, Kellam will be supervised by federal probation authorities for 15 years, Hickey ordered. Kellam can’t have unsupervised contact with children under 18 and must register as a sex offender.
