A Reno parolee was sentenced in federal court to 22 years in prison on Thursday after he posed online as a teenage boy to entice girls to send him sexually explicit photos.
Ira Gene Weirich Jr., 59, plead guilty to one count of distribution of child pornography and one count of receipt of child pornography.
U.S. District Judge Miranda Du sentenced him to lifetime supervised release in addition to his prison term.
Weirich is required to register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.
Weirich was serving a life sentence in state prison for a 1978 rape, kidnapping and robbery of a woman. He was granted parole in February 2013 where during that time he was given an iPad to take online classes by the State of Nevada. Later that year Nevada parole officers discovered that Weirich was using the iPad to entice about a dozen girls to send him nude and sexually explicit photos. He had been posing as a teenage boy on social media and chat rooms.
Weirich admitted in an interview by law enforcement that he enjoyed having control and power over his victims, and that "“it wasn’t necessarily about the nude picture, it was about getting the nude picture.”
The case was investigated by the Northern Nevada Child Exploitation Task Force, the Reno Police Department, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office and the Nevada Attorney General's Office.
