BANGOR, Maine — A registered sex offender was arrested Thursday and charged in U.S. District Court with possession of child pornography nearly two years after his sister told police she found sexually explicit images on his computer.
Ernest Cook, 58, of Bangor is a lifetime registrant of the Maine Sex Offender Registry because he was convicted in 1997 of sexually abusing a 3-year-old.
He made his first court appearance Thursday afternoon and did not enter a plea because he has not yet been indicted by a federal grand jury.
The U.S. attorney’s office asked that Cook be held without bail pending the resolution of his case. Cook will be held without bail pending a hearing next week to determine if he is eligible for bail.
Cook’s computer and flash drive were seized on Dec. 21, 2014, by a detective with the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office, according to the complaint. Cook’s sister, who is not named in the document, called police after she discovered what she believed to be child pornography on Cook’s computer when he was staying at her home in Burnham.
The computer and flash drive were turned over Dec. 29, 2014, to the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit for forensic examination, the complaint said. That examination, completed in July 2016, found more than 750 images of child pornography on the computer’s hard drive and the flash drive. The examiner found that the majority of the files depicted prepubescent girls under the age of 12 being sexually assaulted by adult men.
Lt. Glenn Lang, head of the Computer Crimes Unit, said Thursday in an email that the time it takes to complete the forensic examinations of computers, external hard drives and flash drives “is dependent on a number of factors, including the type of crime, if the person has been arrested and if there are any exigent circumstances.”
Homicides and sexual exploitation cases get the highest priority, he said.
Cook was not arrested until after the exam was completed and he was not suspected of sexual exploitation of children, according to court documents.
“Eighteen months is pretty long, although, we have some a fair amount older,” Lang said. “There are currently 479 cases and over 1,600 pieces of evidence in the backlog.”
If convicted, Cook faces between 10 and 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.