JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — Editor's Note: The video above is from a previous story dated Oct. 21, 2020.
Sobbing and apologizing to both his family and the child victims of his porn obsession, a former Nassau County Fire Rescue employee said he took “full responsibility” for his actions.
“There is nothing I can say or do to minimize [what I’ve done],” 35-year-old Robert Arthur Ginder of Callahan told U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan. “I most likely will never meet any of my victims, but that doesn’t make them any less real. They were innocent children and they didn’t deserve any of this.”
Corrigan sentenced Ginder to 7 and a half years in prison for accessing and distributing images of child sexual exploitation. Before he did, he expressed bafflement.
“It’s just all so inhuman and so grotesque, that it’s hard to understand how any human being would seek it out and get gratification from it,” Corrigan said. “It just seems – it’s just indescribable to me.”
Ginder, a former Marine, Pop Warner coach, and president of his homeowner's association, was arrested last October and pleaded guilty in April.
On Tuesday, prosecutors told a judge he possessed and exchanged thousands of illegal pictures and videos, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Ashley Washington told the judge were “some of the worst content.”
“It is not a couple minutes here and there,” she said of the videos, noting one was nearly 3 hours long, and many had sound. “What was especially unusual about his collection is that so many of these images showed images of children being raped.”
Washington herself grew emotional describing the quantity and content of the images, some of which she reviewed ahead of sentencing. “It is very clear these children are being traumatized and abused, and it is against their will.”
In addition to his 90-month prison term, Ginder must provide victim restitution in an amount yet to be decided, undergo mental health counseling, serve 10 years probation, register as a sex offender and have no contact with anyone under 18 without prior approval.
After pronouncing the sentence, Corrigan addressed the nameless victims for the record.
“The images that we are talking about here are really unspeakably evil. It’s just hard to think one human being could do that to another. And it’s hard to believe another would get gratification from that," Corrigan said. "But I do offer my comfort to the victims. Hopefully, they can find a way to cope with that and get beyond this and not have it define them for the rest of their lives.”