It was announced by the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday that former Wrangell Doctor, 54-year-old Greg Alan Salard was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 20 years in federal prison for child pornography distribution charges.

Salard was convicted in July of 2015 following a six-day trial for trading child pornography on a peer-to-peer network in 2014. Investigators traced file sharing to Salard’s IP address in June after opening an investigation the previous month. It was in June that prosecutors showed in court that Salard downloaded a portion of a four-minute video depicting “an adult male molesting a four-year-old child.”

By October, it was found that Salard was making child pornography available to other users on the peer-to-peer network.

On October 15th, investigators requested and received a search warrant for the Salard residence. Officers waited for Salard’s wife to leave the house while Salard remained alone in the house. Within minutes of her leaving, agents observing his Internet activity, noted that he signed on to the peer-to-peer network and began offering files showing sex scenes with prepubescent children, prosecutors revealed at trial.

It was also pointed out during the trial that investigators waited 10 minutes before knocking on Salard’s door to serve the warrant. It took Salard an additional eight minutes to answer it. Prosecutors say that Salard spent those eight minutes attempting to wipe the files from his computer. It was noted that he only succeeded in wiping 35% of the files before officers were able to halt the program.

A forensic computer examiner was later able to recover the partially erased files from Salard’s computer and save evidence that showed that the files had been viewed on the computer, court documents revealed. Evidence showed that Salard had downloaded over 500 files from P2P networks between February and October of 2014. During that time, the computer examiner was able to obtain evidence that Salard had attempted to delete evidence of his illegal activities at least four times during that period.[xyz-ihs snippet=”adsense-body-ad”]

At sentencing, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess focused on the defendant’s “extremely serious conduct,” and the “thoughtful, deliberate, and sophisticated way in which he obtained the material.” Judge Burgess noted that Salard “was sophisticated enough to put [his child pornography] into files no one searching for it would know were child pornography…he was sophisticated enough to alter the default features of [the file-sharing program. That was not an unintentional step…and only adds to the seriousness.”

Saying that Salard showed no acknowledgement of his guilt and did not seem to come to terms with the fact that he committed a crime, Judge Burgess said that there was nothing to assure him that Salard would not engage in child exploitation crimes in the future. In addition to his 20 year sentence, Salard was also sentenced to a looifetime of supervised release and a $25,000 fine.

Salard is expected to be extradited to Louisiana to face further charges of aggravated rape in Caddo Parish where he stands accused of committing oral intercourse with a child under the age of 13.

The convicted felon was a practicing family doctor in Wrangell since 2009. Following his arrest and indictment, Salard’s medical privileges at the Alaska Island Community Services were suspended.[xyz-ihs snippet=”Adversal-468×60″]

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