Hayim Cohen gained notoriety on YouTube and TikTok as a rabbi who took in children and cared for them. As time went on, the 40-year-old Texas man told his followers that he suffered from an illness and was in hospice.

But it turned out that, apparently, Cohen was neither terminally ill nor a rabbi — and he was sexually abusing his adopted sons.

On Monday, a Houston judge sentenced Cohen to 40 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to four counts of continuous sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child.

“You realize you are never going to get out of prison, you’re going to die in prison?” Judge Lanilo Lacayo asked Cohen.

The defendant continued to feign illness during the sentencing hearing, not answering Lacayo when he asked him his age.

“I know you understand everything I’ve said to you from the beginning to the end,” Lacayo said, according to local CBS affiliate KHOU. “You ran an interesting con, sir. You violated all these boys and you’re here today facing justice.”

Houston police detectives began investigating when one of the victims called into an Atlanta-based podcast on a burner phone and detailed the abuse. The podcaster contacted authorities.

Police arrested Cohen in February 2023 on allegations that he had abused six of his nine adopted sons. When they went to his house they were met with a hospice care provider purportedly looking after Cohen. However, when detectives took him to two hospitals, doctors could find nothing medically wrong with him.

More from Law&Crime: ‘I thought my child was safe’: School janitor who rubbed private parts on cafeteria utensils, sprayed bleach on cucumbers learns fate

Being in jail has apparently not stopped Cohen from continuing to fake his sickness. In a hearing about a month after his arrest, he showed up in a wheelchair and a urine drainage bag. On Monday, he appeared in court with a shaved head and face, looking like he had lost a significant amount of weight. He was still in a wheelchair.

Prosecutors still believe he is mostly faking his illness.

He usually met the young kids through friends or significant others. Over a 25-year period, he groomed and sexually abused at least six girls — all under the age of 12.

On Thursday, a Missouri judge sentenced 53-year-old Edward Martinez to nine life sentences in prison. A jury in September convicted Martinez of a slew of charges, including child molestation, statutory rape and statutory sodomy. Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Patterson said in a press release that the abuse occurred between 1996 and 2021. The oldest victim was 12. The youngest: 4. Prosecutors called him a “serial child molester.”

More on Law&Crime: Teacher’s aide accused of raping teenage student with mental capacity of 9-year-old after boy’s mom catches her at their home on a snow day, cops say

“The evidence showed that Martinez was a manipulative predator who groomed the girls and their families with gifts and financial support in order to have access to the young girls,” the press release stated.

Martinez claimed the girls were lying and made up the stories because they knew he had been found not guilty of similar charges back in the 1990s. But this jury didn’t buy his story.

The panel took just two hours to convict him. After another 30 minutes of deliberation, they recommended the nine life sentences the judge would impose Thursday.

An Ohio judge sentenced a father to prison for spending nearly two decades abusing and torturing his seven children, including forcing his then 14-year-old son to eat dog food and sleep in a shed.

Jason Fuller, 44, pleaded guilty to seven counts of endangering children, the Delaware County Prosecutor’s Office said in a press release. Delaware County Common Pleas Judge James P. Schuck sentenced Fuller to 17.5 years in prison on Monday.

“Jason Fuller’s sentence is almost one year in prison for every year he terrorized his family. We are extremely thankful these victims will be protected from him while he serves his prison sentence,” Delaware County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Schiffel said in a statement.

More from Law&Crime: Man ‘angry about a couch cushion’ beat 12-year-old for nearly 30 minutes, taunting him to ‘suck d—‘ while hitting him over 50 times: Cops

Fuller’s wife, Kristelle Fuller, was sentenced to two years probation after she pleaded guilty to obstructing justice for telling her kids to lie to investigators to protect their father.

According to a probable cause affidavit obtained by Columbus Fox affiliate WTTE, the investigation began in September 2023 when the county’s Family Services received a complaint about child abuse after someone overheard one of the sons say he was locked in a shed and fed dog food when he was 14. Officers from the Delaware Police Department went to the home and interviewed Kristelle Fuller and the son in question. The son at first denied making the comment but then said he remembered an incident that happened about six years prior in which he was “punished for doing something inappropriate in front of his sister and was grounded to the shed for a couple of nights.”

The victim said the unattached shed was in the backyard and it occurred around August. He said he was allowed back in the house in the daytime. Investigators then spoke with the victim without his mother present. An investigator asked him if there was any audio or surveillance video within the home and he said he had a device “right now that he was supposed to be recording me with,” the affidavit said. The victim said he was not recording at the time and the investigator told him he was free to do so as the officer also was filming with his body-worn camera, the affidavit said.

Detectives asked Kristelle Fuller if she remembered the incident and she said “Sure.” She then said she was instructed by her attorney not to speak with them.

A Nebraska man called the police to report he shot and killed his roommate, whom he accused of abusing his adult daughter and giving her drugs.

Rodolfo Cateura Nogueras, 40, pleaded no contest in Colfax County District Court to second-degree murder in the death of Ariel Varella Herrera, 45, and second-degree assault in the nonfatal shooting of a neighbor, court documents said.

An affidavit lays out the case that came to light on April 7 at 11:29 p.m. when a call came into Colfax County dispatch.

The Spanish-speaking caller, later identified as Cateura Nogueras, said he had a 20-year-old daughter living with him and a roommate, and the roommate was giving his daughter drugs and abusing her, the affidavit said.

“I’m not calling you to turn him in, I’m calling to tell you I shot him in the head, and I killed him,” he said.

He told the dispatcher where the shooting happened, at a storage facility in Schuyler, about 70 miles west of Omaha. He said he wanted to speak with an officer in person at a local truck stop, but he did not meet up with an officer that night.

At the storage facility, police found blood on the ground and a .22 shell casing outside unit #23. Inside, a sergeant saw blood and another spent .22 caliber shell casing. Authorities found the victim’s body under black plastic tarps in the back of the unit.

Video surveillance footage from a neighboring business showed multiple people in Varela Herrera’s Dodge Caravan coming to the storage unit at 9:33 a.m. After that, the individuals are seen going in and out of storage unit #23 and back into the van.

One man is seen outside the van, looking around, and then going into storage unit #23, which continues throughout the day until 7:52 p.m., when the van leaves. The van then returns at 10:19 p.m. Video shows multiple flashes of light in the van with multiple people inside. Twenty minutes later, a man who appears to be bleeding is seen running from the storage unit.

That man sought treatment at a hospital for a gunshot wound and identified Cateura Nogueras as the person who shot him. During the police interview, the wounded man said he didn’t know where Varella Herrera was.

“He said he was worried about Varella Herrera because Cateura Nogueras told him that Varella Herrera was ‘tied up,”” the affidavit said.

The surviving victim also told police he believed that Cateura Nogueras tried to kill him, shooting him twice — one bullet knocking out a tooth later found on the floor of the storage unit and another that grazed his face and went through his arm, court documents said.

Police tracked down Cateura Nogueras through his cellphone in the early morning hours of April 8 in Missouri. A Buchanan, Missouri, deputy located a Pontiac G-6 parked in a general store parking lot where his phone was pinging. His daughter was with him. Deputies found a .22 caliber Phoenix Arms handgun in the vehicle, court documents said.

Cateura-Nogueras is set to be sentenced on Jan. 22.

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

An upstate New York man will spend the next seven years in state prison for the repeat sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl.

In late January, Gerald Hale, 36, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal sexual act in the first degree. After being on the run from police for nearly two months, he turned himself in on multiple counts, including sexual abuse in the second degree, attempted rape in the second degree, criminal sexual act in the first degree, criminal sexual act in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, endangering the welfare of a child, and a parole violation in April 2022.

On Thursday, Onondaga County Court Judge Matthew J. Doran held a sentencing hearing during which the victim’s family revealed shocking and tragic details about how Hale sought to manipulate his victim.

A New York day care operator pleaded guilty on Thursday to sexually abusing an 11-year-old boy in his care. The Department of Justice said in a press statement that Silfredo Castillo Martinez, 34, possessed almost 10,000 image of child sexual abuse material.

According to court documents, Google gave the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children a tip on April 25, 2022, that a user had uploaded what appeared to be child sexual abuse material.

An Iowa teacher accused of sending “obscene” materials to three minors on Snapchat has pleaded guilty to charges of sexually abusing a 14-year-old child.

Cassidy Sue Kraus, a 24-year-old middle school reading teacher who reportedly resigned from her job in the IKM-Manning Community School District (CSD), pleaded guilty to charges including third-degree sexual abuse and two counts of lascivious acts with a child. She’s set to be sentenced on March 11, according to online court records.