BURLINGTON — A federal judge has sentenced a former emergency room doctor at the University of Vermont Medical Center to more than eight years in prison for possessing child sex abuse images.
“There are so many victims,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Masterson, the prosecutor, said in federal court Tuesday. “It’s just a devastating amount.”
Eike Blohm, 39, was arrested in April 2020, a busy time at the Burlington hospital just one month into the Covid-19 pandemic. His arrest came after a hospital employee found a hidden camera in the emergency department’s unisex bathroom.
According to investigators, the camera had been concealed in an air freshener. Investigators later found 900 videos showing hospital employees in at least two of the medical center’s bathrooms.
Blohm was fired from his job. In a search of his home, authorities seized several digital devices that contained child sex abuse images, some depicting children under 12 years old, and sadistic and masochistic abuse against children.
In federal court Tuesday, Blohm spoke for more than 15 minutes, telling the judge he has had ample time to contemplate the actions that landed him in jail, and the steps he pledged to take to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“Are you going to address the entitlement?” Judge Christina Reiss asked him.
“I thought I belonged to an elite,” Blohm replied. “That made my head a lot bigger than it should.”
A plea agreement in the case allowed the judge to sentence Blohm to a prison term of anywhere between eight and 11 years.
Masterson, the prosecutor, called on Reiss to sentence Blohm to a little over nine years behind bars. Lisa Shelkrot, Blohm’s attorney, asked the judge to sentence her client to the minimum of eight years.
In the end, Reiss sentenced Blohm to eight years and four months, and to then spend 12 years on supervised release. In addition, the judge ordered Blohm to pay more than $30,000 restitution to his identified victims.
As a result of plea deals in federal and state courts, Blohm, formerly of South Burlington,
pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of possessing child sex abuse images. He also pleaded guilty in state court to lewd and lascivious conduct and voyeurism charges.
The prison terms in the state and federal cases will be served simultaneously. Blohm got credit for time he has already served behind bars since May 2020 as he awaited resolution of his cases.
Blohm, speaking before the judge handed down the sentence in the federal case Tuesday, said that any apology he would make would come across as “self-serving.” So, instead, Blohm said, he had written out his apologies and would make them available to his victims through a victims’ advocate, if they wanted to read them.
Blohm told the judge he continues to ask himself how and why he committed the illegal acts, describing it as the thrill of doing something forbidden and a “reward” for the long hours he put in at the hospital. He said it was particularly difficult to understand given that he’s trained to help people.
“I worked in the emergency department and treated sexual assault survivors,” Blohm told the judge.
He said he calculated it would cost taxpayers well over $1 million for investigating and prosecuting his case and housing him for years in prison.
Blohm said that, while he could never repay that amount, he wanted to “atone” once he is eventually released from prison, even if he can’t practice medicine again.
He said he plans to form a nonprofit organization aimed at helping “high-risk” incarcerated people find housing after they are released.
Blohm described asking himself if his problem was pedophilia. Masterson said she had the answer.
“Yes,” she said, “it is.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Former UVM Medical Center doctor gets 8 years in prison for child sex abuse images.