Florida man who was an Army lieutenant colonel when caught with child porn admits guilt

A man who was an Army lieutenant colonel when the FBI says he was busted with child pornography depicting children as young as 4 pleaded guilty in Fort Lauderdale federal court earlier this week.

Edgar Ali Cerda, 49, first popped up on the radar of the Davie Police Department when detectives received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in December 2020, court documents show. The government-funded organization was alerting police about a person using the instant messaging app Kik to share videos with other users of girls and boys under 12 years old being sexually abused.

After a Davie detective obtained a court order for the IP address — a unique set of numbers that identifies a device on the internet — used during the illegal act, the internet provider Comcast informed authorities that Cerda was the subscriber.

Later, police transferred the case to federal agents after realizing Cerda lived outside Davie city boundaries. After looking further into the case, the agents got a search warrant for his home in Cooper City.

On March 20, 2021, law enforcement executed the warrant, finding additional child porn videos on a Toshiba laptop showing men sexually abusing boys and girls, prosecutors say.

During an interrogation with agents, they say Cerda admitted to owning the email address tied to the Kik account and to seeing and sharing child porn.

The three-tours Iraq war veteran served as a logistics officer from May 1998 to June 2022, Lt. Colonel Ruth Castro, an Army spokeswoman, told the Miami Herald in an email Friday.

“Due to the Privacy Act and Department of Defense policy, we do not comment on misconduct of lower level employees or characterization of discharge,” Castro said.

“Edgar Ali Cerda, who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, knowingly possessed the images found on his devices,” prosecutors said in a December 2023 court document that Cerda signed. “Cerda knew the images in question depicted minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and the lascivious exhibition of the genitals.”

Cerda was charged in May and he pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a charge of possession of child pornography.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Feb. 28. Cerda faces up to 20 years in federal prison and up to a lifetime of supervised release, The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida said Thursday in a news release.