NORTHAMPTON — A former Amherst resident already serving time in Oregon for child pornography offenses was sentenced to an additional prison term earlier this month after pleading guilty to 11 counts involving the possession and dissemination of material depicting child sexual abuse, according to the Northwestern district attorney’s office.
Hampshire Superior Court Judge James Manitsas sentenced Blake Lassiter to 4½ to five years in state prison.
Lassiter, 30, was indicted by a Hampshire County grand jury earlier this year following an investigation by the Amherst Police Department sparked by a tip sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by an internet service provider, according to court documents. The alleged offense dates span from Dec. 26, 2021, to March 24, 2022.
Manitsas also sentenced Lassiter to serve five years of probation once he is released from state prison, with conditions that he have no unsupervised contact with minors, undergo sex offender treatment and allow the Probation Department to search his electronic devices. The sentences will not take effect until after Lassiter completes a 24-month jail sentence in Oregon for similar charges.
For the Massachusetts crimes, Northwestern Assistant District Attorney Anne Yereniuk recommended a 10-12 year state prison sentence. Defense attorney Joseph Simmons had recommended a state prison sentence concurrent with the Oregon sentence.
Court documents state that Lassiter left Oregon while he was under investigation on child porn offenses and stayed for a time in the Amherst apartment complex where his mother lived. During that time, he allegedly used a Reddit account to upload and disseminate pornographic images of children to another Reddit user.
The images reported in the cybertip involved girls estimated to be 6 to 12 years old, according to court documents.
“Despite the best efforts of the Amherst Police Department and the National Child Victim Identification Program at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, we were unable to identify the child victims depicted in these images, but we know the impact of the defendant’s behavior on those children is devastating,” Yereniuk said in a statement.
“Thanks to the hard work of the Amherst Police Department in cooperation with the Clatsop County Sheriff’s office investigators, justice was finally served.”
The case involved the distribution of images of abuse to another party in the United Kingdom. Lead investigator Joshua Harris from the Amherst Police Department Detective Bureau applied for and obtained numerous search warrants, including for relevant social media accounts.
Lassiter, a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard, became the subject of a cyber tip investigation first in Oregon and then in Amherst, where he moved, based on images he uploaded to his Reddit social media account.