Jose Saez Jr., ex-Brentwood pastor, sentenced to more than 17 years in prison for sexually exploiting a child

A former Brentwood pastor was sentenced to 17½  years in federal prison Tuesday for enticing minors to perform sexually explicit acts and sending videos of the encounters to other men.

Jose Saez Jr., 31, who has been a pastor at Iglesia Cristiana Alumbrando El Camino church on Second Avenue in Brentwood, had pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a child in March 2025. Prosecutors said he also persuaded one minor to meet him in 2023 at the popular Heritage Park in Mount Sinai, where he raped him in a bathroom stall.

U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack said despite Saez committing “reprehensible” acts that are “among the most serious this court confronts,” his past history as an abuse victim, the good he did as a pastor and his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis since his arrest were factors in giving him a below-guideline sentence.

“He received a sentence of a different sort from a higher authority,” Azrack said of the condition that has left Saez in a wheelchair.

Saez, seated in a wheelchair, apologized to his victims, his family and his church community. He said he was particularly remorseful for thinking only of himself in the immediate aftermath of his arrest. He said he feels shame for his actions.

“I failed the standards I preached,” Saez told the court, “the values I believed in.”

Prosecutors had sought a guideline sentence of 24⅓ to 30 years behind bars while the defense asked for the mandatory minimum of 15 years.

Prosecutors called Saez’s conduct “egregious and predatory,” saying he pretended to be both a politician and law enforcement as he persuaded minors he met online to perform sexual acts he would record. He sometimes asked children to show him identification that proved they were underage, Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Toporovsky wrote in a presentencing memorandum.

In court Tuesday, Toporovsky said that while he agrees Saez has shown remorse since his 2023 arrest, his conduct deserved serious punishment. The prosecutor called online victimization easy to do and to hide and said he found Saez’s in-person encounter with a minor particularly troubling.

“To me, that crosses a major line,” Toporovsky said, calling his actions “way scarier, way more dangerous” than if he had only victimized people online.

No victims addressed the court at sentencing.

Prosecutors previously said one victim was 15 years old and another was 19, but presented himself to the pastor as being 16.

Prosecutors said Saez had used an encrypted messaging service to engage in sexually explicit conversations with minors before his arrest in 2023. In conversations with an undercover law enforcement officer in August 2023, Saez said that he had sexually abused an infant, that his "sweet spot" was molesting children between the ages of 11 and 15, and that he was able to find his younger victims at church, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office news release.

Prosecutors said at a December 2023 court appearance that a raid on Saez's Brentwood home found evidence he engaged in explicit online chats with as many as 30 minors, though they said it would be difficult to identify each of the youths.

In some cases, prosecutors have said, Saez contacted victims through open channels, then coerced them to move to the encrypted networks to continue the exchanges. Saez sometimes pretended to be a girl to convince boys to interact with him, prosecutors have said.

Prosecutors said investigators discovered hundreds of videos and thousands of images of child sexual abuse on devices seized from the Brentwood home Saez shared with his wife and young children.

Defense attorney Avraham Moskowitz, of Manhattan, said his client suffered abuse at the hands of two older relatives as a child and still managed to rise within his church to be a “child prodigy preacher” who started a family with his supportive wife. The couple’s fourth daughter was born since his incarceration, the defense noted.

“Jose Saez is not the monster that he was portrayed to be [by prosecutors],” Moskowitz said.

Azrack noted that the court received nearly two dozen letters from supporters of Saez, including three pastors. The judge said she would recommend Saez serve his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, where his attorney said he will seek mental health treatment and physical therapy related to his illness.

By Grant Parpan

grant.parpan@newsday.com@GrantParpan

Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.