3 Doctors Suspended Amid Pornography Investigation

Three doctors receiving advanced training in pediatrics at nationally recognized Children’s Hospital here have been suspended amid a criminal investigation into the possibility that they used the hospital’s computer system to access pornography, hospital officials said Friday.

The investigation comes just weeks after the arrests of a respiratory therapist and a nurse at the hospital on suspicion of molesting critically ill children and keeping child pornography on their home computers.

The doctors, who were not identified, have been suspended from their fellowships at UC San Diego medical school, the university said.

A San Diego Police Department spokesperson said the investigation is in its early stages and declined to give specifics.

Children’s Hospital spokesman Tom Hanscom said an audit done on the hospital computer system found that someone had used an access code to peruse a pornography site. The code was issued to one of the doctors, a woman. The two other doctors are associates of the woman and therefore may also have had access to the code, Hanscom said.

He said hospital officials were unable to determine whether the pornography site contains only images of adults or also images involving children.

“We’re just so sensitive to these things now that we immediately turned over the information” to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, composed of local and federal agencies, Hanscom said.

Adult pornography, in most regards, is protected by the 1st Amendment. Child pornography has no such protection and accessing computer sites containing it is against the law.

Hanscom said using the access code to look at pornography violates hospital policy even if it includes only adult images. The access appears to have happened on a home computer, not a computer at the hospital.

The spokesman said the improper use of the access code was discovered by more vigorous auditing adopted in the wake of the arrests of the two hospital employees.

Wayne Albert Bleyle, 54, arrested March 8, is charged with molesting five patients and distributing pornographic pictures of them on the Internet. A respiratory therapist, Bleyle worked at the hospital’s convalescent facility, where many of the patients are in persistent comas.

Christopher Alan Irvin, 32, a nurse arrested April 15, is charged with molesting a 4-year-old girl and distributing child pornography.

Officials have said there is no connection between the two cases.