SPRING—
A Houston pilot was arrested Thursday and charged with six counts of possession of child pornography after investigators found encrypted hard drives containing sexual abuse images.Todd Ewanko, 46, is a pilot for Colgan Air, which subcontracts for Continental Airlines.
Investigators told 39 News this is the largest collection of child pornography they have ever seen. Now they will comb through evidence to find out what else this Houston pilot was up to.
Sgt. Gary Spurger, with the Harris County Precinct 4 high tech crimes unit, has investigated all sorts of computer crimes. But never anything like this, he said.
"This is the most we've seen in the Houston-metro area," Spurger said.
More than six encrypted hard drives with images of child porn were found at Ewanko's home.
"We actually saw this individual on around June the 20th having for share tons of child porn," Spurger said.
Officials said Ewanko provided images of child porn to others using a software sharing program similar to Limewire.
"He was making things available for other people to share right there on the Internet," Spurger said.
Computers and a laptop were confiscated from Ewanko's apartment.
"The first folder that we started to look at had over 1.2 million images in it," Spurger said.
There were cases of DVDs filled with pornographic material also taken away.
"Normally you''ll see on a home machine - you'll see maybe one; maybe two hard drives," said Spurger, pointing to the evidence. "I mean, that's the standard. You'll see one big one. Here you have seven big hard drives."
Investigators told 39 News that Ewanko admitted to collecting images after his arrest.
"He could face life. I mean, if you think about it, every single image in and of itself is its own crime scene," Spurger said.
According to Spurger, 30-40,000 people in Texas are believed to share child porn each month. In the Houston area alone, that is about 11-15,000. It is a glaring number that has many families on edge.
"The best way to protect your child online is parental involvement, period," Spurger said. "Parental involvement [is the] best key. That's what we teach and we preach, and we live it."
The high tech crimes unit will continue to go through the pornographic images to see if they can identify any "live victims." They are making sure no children in the greater Houston area were in any images.
