Child Molester Gets 3 Years, 8 Months

VAN NUYS —  A convicted child molester was sentenced Friday to three years and eight months in prison for using computers at the Los Angeles Central Library to distribute pornography and arrange sexual liaisons with children, prosecutors said.

Jack Hornbeck, 46, of Los Angeles, pleaded no contest to two felony counts stemming from his February 1999 arrest in Van Nuys, the culmination of a two-month Internet sting operation, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Undercover detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department tracked Hornbeck’s moves as he regularly logged onto computers at the library’s main branch and sent e-mails to members of his child pornography club, authorities said. He sent dozens of images of child pornography to a female detective, who posed as a mother willing to let Hornbeck have sex with her three children and other minors.

Hornbeck was arrested in a Van Nuys parking lot, where police said he had traveled to meet the woman in anticipation of a sexual encounter with six children.

The defendant, a registered sex offender convicted in 1995 of oral copulation on a minor, entered his plea in Van Nuys Superior Court just as his trial was set to begin, Gibbons said.

Responding to concerns over children seeing pornography on library computers, several branches of the city library began offering specially designed computers linked to child-friendly Web sites last year. The program is now being expanded to all city libraries.