A federal district judge in Lubbock gave a 30-year prison sentence to a 43-year-old registered sex offender from Plainview after investigators discovered a video that documented the sexual abuse of a teenage girl he drugged in 2017.Albert Torres faced between 15 to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty in April to a count of production of child pornography. He was sentenced Aug. 27 in Lubbock.Torres' charge stems from an FBI investigation that began on Nov. 27, 2025, when a woman he was dating at the time went to the Plainview Police Department to report inappropriate images she found on a memory card he'd given her five days before, according to plea documents.Police investigators reviewed the materials on the card and found multiple videos
of Torres sexually abusing a girl, the documents state.The videos appeared to have been recorded about seven years before and investigators learned the girl was a 15-year-old runaway at the time of the abuse.Investigators spoke with the girl, who was now in her 20s. She said Torres would give her marijuana cigarettes she believed were laced with other drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine before abusing her, the documents state.Court records show Torres was sentenced to six years in prison in 2019 after he pleaded guilty to raping a 15-year-old girl the year before.Hale County jail records show he was arrested in March 2025 and booked into the Hale County Detention Center for a parole violation and was released to federal custody in July 2025 after a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging him with seven counts of production of child pornography and eight counts of possession of child pornography.As part of his plea deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office, the remaining counts were dismissed.
Gabriel Monte is the criminal justice reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in Texas. Have a news tip for him? Email him at gmonte@lubbockonline.com.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Plainview man sentenced to 30 years for recording sexual abuse of teen
