Three years ago, Antonio Felipe Belda was a Canadian-born transplant living the American dream.
He had a wife, a son on the horizon and a cozy home in Baton Rouge’s Garden District. He’d also made good on his dream of becoming a doctor.
But Belda’s charmed life came crashing down in September 2022 when a little more than a month after he was hired as a a pediatric cardiologist at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, he was arrested for possession of child pornography.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in downtown Baton Rouge sentenced Belda to 10 years in prison.
U.S. District Judge John deGravelles called the allegations against Belda “extremely troubling” and described them as “shocking”. When authorities raided Belda's house, they found more than 3,000 images and 171 videos downloade