A Winterport man was sentenced on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Bangor to 240 months in prison followed by 20 years of supervised release for distributing child pornography.
Steven Mathis, 35, pleaded guilty on April 25. Three additional counts, of promoting child pornography, were dismissed.
In August 2021, Mathis sent text messages and explicit images of a 3-year-old girl he was babysitting to another person online, according to court records. Mathis admitted to sending the pictures during an interview with Maine State Police.
Almost two years earlier, in September 2019, a pair of images were flagged by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and a tip was sent to the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit.
After various delays, the investigation into the tips began in November 2021, overlapping with a different state police investigation into Mathis about the explicit images of children, according to a previous Bangor Daily News article.
Police interviewed Mathis in August 2021, when he admitted to sexually abusing two children. Mathis fled to Texas at some point after that interview and was arrested there in November 2021. He was then extradited back to Maine.
