BOSTON, Sept. 28, 2018—A Superior Court jury yesterday convicted a computer technician of possessing child pornography after he left a hard drive with graphic sexual images of children at a Boston job site, Suffolk County District Attorney John P. Pappas said.

MICHAEL KRATHWOHL, 28, of Ipswich was convicted yesterday after five days of trial and about three hours of deliberations. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Hélène Kazanjian ordered him taken into custody following the verdict.

“Child pornography documents sexual violence against children,” Pappas said. “These weren’t pictures a parent might take of a child in the bath. They were precisely what was contemplated when the legislature made possessing child pornography a felony.”

Assistant District Attorney Melissa Brooks proved that Krathwohl worked at a Woburn computer support company providing services to a Boston-based client in the fall of 2013. Testimony revealed that an employee at that client business opened his work station on Sept. 30 of that year to find pornography on an external hard drive that had been left there. The employee notified Krathwohl’s employer, who sent a staffer to retrieve the hard drive.

Krathwohl’s employer viewed images on the hard drive on another computer and observed them to depict children engaged in sexual activity. On the advice of counsel, he sought to provide the hard drive to law enforcement. The case was initially investigated by Woburn Police and the Middlesex District Attorney’s office, which performed a preliminary review after copying the hard drive and also found the images to be consistent with child pornography.

Because the hard drive was recovered in Boston, however, Middlesex prosecutors ultimately referred the case to the Human Trafficking & Exploitation Unit of the Suffolk DA’s office, which investigated with the Boston Police Crimes Against Children Unit. That investigation entailed extensive and labor-intensive computer forensic efforts to determine whether the images belonged to Krathwohl or were left on his hard drive when he used it to back up another person’s computer in the course of his work.

Those efforts – which included matching security identification numbers, or SIDs, to the child pornography folder, a work-related folder, and a personal folder all on the same drive – paid off, Pappas said.

Krathwohl faces sentencing at 3:00 pm on Nov. 9. He was represented by attorneys Richard Sweeney and Sabrina Bonanno.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.