A former campus ministry official at Villanova University who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography has been sentenced to more than six years in prison — a punishment he admitted he deserves.
Timothy O’Connell, the onetime associate director of campus ministry at the private Catholic university in Pennsylvania, was sentenced Thursday to 78 months in a federal lockup and 10 years of post-release supervision, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
O’Connell, who was suspended by Villanova and barred from campus following his July 2018 arrest, told a judge he was “disgusted” by his behavior prior to sentencing.
“I stand before you today filled with remorse and deep shame,” the 52-year-old Drexel Hill man told the judge while admitting that he acquired child porn over the internet. “I deserve to be right where I am.”
An FBI investigation into Justyn Perez-Colon, a now-convicted child pornographer, led authorities to O’Connell, who confessed to using the Kik app to receive explicit images of children as young as 18 months old from Perez-Colon, the Inquirer reported.
A search of Perez-Colon’s iPhone led detectives to O’Connell via a Gmail account that he accessed at his home and inside his office at Villanova, according to a criminal complaint.
O’Connell later admitted to FBI investigators that he was sexually attracted to a third-grade girl he knew and admitted to looking at child porn on the internet, Philadelphia Magazine reported in June.
O’Connell’s attorney sought leniency from a judge, suggesting a prison sentence of five years. He said the former ministry official had pleaded guilty and has become a model jail inmate by working as a suicide prevention counselor and teaching English to others behind bars.
The judge was unmoved, however, calling O’Connell a “danger to society” as he ordered the former Villanova official to pay more than $10,000 in fines and register as a sex offender upon his release.
“Obviously, these cases are extremely difficult,” Judge Gerald Pappert said. “The subject matter is heartbreaking. It’s hard to understand how things get to this point.”
Prior to his time at Villanova, O’Connell worked in Hispanic ministry outreach for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
A message seeking comment from Villanova officials was not immediately returned early Friday.
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