Ex-Pomona councilman sentenced to probation in child porn case

A former Pomona city councilman will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life under the terms of a plea deal he reached with Los Angeles County prosecutors, authorities said Wednesday.

Rubio Gonzalez, 45, was sentenced to three years of probation and a year of counseling after pleading no contest to one count of possession of child sexual abuse material and one count of annoying or molesting a child, according to a statement released by the district attorney’s office.

“He took advantage of his position and violated the privacy and innocence of children,” Dist. Atty. George Gascón said in the statement.

Gonzalez was arrested in May and accused of taking inappropriate pictures of students at Cortez and Arroyo elementary schools, where he had worked as a substitute teacher. Investigators also alleged they discovered images containing child pornography on Gonzalez’s computer.

If convicted as charged, Gonzalez faced up to seven years in state prison.

A spokesman for the district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the terms of the negotiated plea. But according to a directive issued by Gascón late last year, prosecutors have been ordered to seek probation in cases where a defendant is eligible to receive it, barring “extraordinary circumstances.”

In an e-mail to a Times reporter last year, Gonzalez said the charges stemmed from his “inappropriate use of technology, but no child was ever molested by me.”

At the time, Gonzalez described himself as the “only advocate against violence toward women and children” on the City Council and said he was one of the founders of a multi-agency human trafficking coalition that supported the Pomona Police Department’s efforts to rescue women and teenagers from prostitution and sex trafficking.

Gonzalez was a teacher for more than 15 years, working for the Pomona and Los Angeles unified school districts as well as several other districts in California and Texas, according to his since-deleted biography on the city of Pomona’s website.