A 33-year-old Kansas City man has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for taking pornographic pictures of a young boy he sponsored through a local mentoring program.

Cory Stahl was sentenced Monday in in Kansas City to the maximum sentence for producing child pornography as part of a January plea bargain.

Prosecutors say Stahl began mentoring the boy in 2006, when the child was 9 years old, and sent erotic photographs of the youth to a man in Baltimore a year later.

The Baltimore man was arrested in September 2010 for distributing child pornography and told federal agents about Stahl, who was charged in January 2011 after apparently trying to kill himself by crashing his car into an oncoming truck on a northwest Missouri highway.