2 days ago
Court briefs: 19 years for child porn; restitution dropped in murder sentence
A LaPorte man was sentenced to 19 years Thursday for trading child pornography online.
A federal jury convicted Ron Deming, 38, in April in the U.S. District Court of South Bend of receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography, according to a news release.
He will also serve 10 years on supervised release and repay $148,500 in restitution.
Court filings show authorities opened an investigation in March 2024 after Deming sent and received child porn on a file-sharing site, BitTorrent. They traced his IP address.
Federal prosecutors alleged after a search warrant, Deming said he collected child porn for 20 years. They found 30,000 images and over 400 videos on seized devices.
Court records note Deming has a degree in elementary education. It was not immediately clear where he may have worked in the past.
'He was previously employed as a teacher and most recently as behavior technician teaching life skills to children with disabilities, some nonverbal,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Hannah Jones wrote.
His defense lawyer Kurt Earnst painted a different story, noting his client has been unable to maintain regular employment as an adult.
The Indiana Appeals Court said Thursday that a man convicted in a brutal killing at a Planet Fitness in Valparaiso no longer has to repay $5,000 to a Victim's Assistance Unit fund.
Jordan Andrade, now 26, of Porter Township, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the October 2023 murder of Valparaiso University computer science graduate student Varun Pucha, 29. He was sentenced to 60 years.
His conviction stands. His earliest release date is in 2068.
Appeals Judge Robert Altice wrote prosecutors filed the day after sentencing to add the $5,000 payment. They didn't 'have the authority' to do it, he concluded. The plea agreement did not specify what he should owe, only saying that '[r]estitution (was) to be determined by the Victim's Assistance Unit within thirty (30) days' of the plea.
The unit 'neither determined the amount of restitution within this timeframe nor provided the trial court with this figure at or before the sentencing hearing,' he wrote.
Andrade stabbed Pucha in the head as he was sitting on a massage chair. Pucha's parents from India could not make it to the Fort Wayne hospital before he died about a week later.
