A former Bucks County schoolteacher was sentenced to 7½ years in prison for possessing thousands of images of child pornography

A former longtime teacher at a Catholic grade school in Bucks County was sentenced Wednesday to 7½ years in prison for possessing thousands of photos and videos of child pornography he had amassed over the course of a decade.

Richard Adamsky, 66 — who spent nearly 40 years as a teacher and sports coach at Nativity of Our Lord Catholic School in Warminster — said he was deeply ashamed and remorseful for his actions.

He had developed an untreated addiction to child pornography over the years, he said, and did not realize at the time that his behavior was contributing to an industry that abuses and traumatizes young people.

“I failed to appreciate I was not only hurting myself … I was engaging in behavior that victimized children,” Adamsky said.

Adamsky was not accused of abusing any children. And his attorneys said his actions in this case were not particularly sophisticated. Most of the images on his computer had been obtained through relatively simple Google searches, they said.

But U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert said Adamsky’s conduct was “horrendous,” pointing out that he had sought out and possessed illegal material for years, that he had searched for photos depicting the abuse of children who were sometimes prepubescent or even toddlers, and that Adamsky was an educated man who should have sought help long ago.

“The damage that’s done both in extent and duration is really incalculable,” Pappert said. “The search terms were extremely graphic and showed how premeditated and depraved the defendant’s conduct really was.”

Adamsky was arrested last June and charged by the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office. Federal prosecutors then indicted him in September, after which his state case was dropped.

Adamsky pleaded guilty in December to child pornography charges. Prosecutors said in court documents that he had downloaded thousands of images onto his computer over many years, sometimes using search terms that involved words such as student or teacher.

Adamsky said in court that he had sought therapy after his arrest, and that he had begun to reckon with the consequences of an addiction he had not confronted until then.

“Simply put, if one child is victimized, that’s one child too many,” he said.

And although Pappert acknowledged it was unusual that Adamsky was never accused of acting inappropriately with any of his students even as he was committing his crimes at home, that did not mean his actions were harmless.

“The defendant gratified himself using images of children being sexually abused,” Pappert said. “That just re-victimizes these children over and over and over, and fuels the market for this filth.”