Therapist gets 46 months prison for child porn

June 28, 2011

A former San Diego elementary-school counselor was sentenced Monday to three years and 10 months in federal prison in a child-pornography case.

Thomas Henry Ceglarek, 58, pleaded guilty in March to two counts of possession of child pornography and one count of perjury.

U.S District Judge M. James Lorenz also sentenced Ceglarek to 15 years of supervised release and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine and register as a sex offender.

Ceglarek admitted that he possessed two computers that had images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. He also admitted that he falsely claimed that he was unemployed in October 2010 in order to obtain a court-appointed attorney. In fact, he was being paid about $70,000 a year by the school district, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Ceglarek, who now lives in Mercer, Wis., had been a counselor at Foster Elementary School in the Allied Gardens area.

He had been hired by the school district in 1997, a district spokeswoman said earlier. He had been placed on paid administrative leave following his arrest, per district policy, and was discharged following his conviction.

[Psychcrime.org note: Ceglarek was licensed with the California Board of Behavioral Sciences as a marriage and family therapist from 1992 until this past March, when his license expired.]

Source: Susan Shroder, "Former school counselor sentenced in child-porn case," San Diego Union-Tribune, June 27, 2011.