A former Woodland middle school teacher who admitted to downloading and sharing thousands of child pornography files was sentenced in federal court Monday to five years in prison.

Christopher Tomsett, 44, an English teacher and soccer coach at Douglass Middle School prior to his arrest last year, will be required to register as a sex offender upon his parole, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner said in a news release. Tomsett also must undergo five years of supervised release.

Tomsett pleaded guilty in April to receiving child pornography. He faced a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Authorities began investigating Tomsett in March 2010, when a detective sergeant with the Saskatoon Police Service in Canada detected a computer user with the screen name “Hobbesnyll” sharing at least 11,835 child pornography files, according to an FBI affidavit in the case.

The IP address for Hobbesnyll indicated that Tomsett was the subscriber at the time of the downloads, the affidavit says. Federal authorities served a search warrant at his Woodland home, seizing two computers and other evidence.

FBI Special Agent Laura Jones wrote in the affidavit that the images found on Tomsett’s computers “do not appear to be computer-generated images, but rather are images depicting real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”

During a subsequent interview, Tomsett reportedly admitted downloading and sharing child pornography — most of it depicting boys between the ages of 12 and 18 — for about a year, though he first started viewing pornographic images about five years ago, the affidavit said.

— Reach Lauren Keene at [email protected] or (530) 747-8048. Follow her on Twitter @laurenkeene

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