An Ash Flat doctor's Arkansas medical license was suspended Monday after his arrest Friday on charges that he arranged for someone he thought was the mother of a 4-year-old girl to take her daughter across state lines for sexual purposes.
During a conference call meeting, the Arkansas Medical Board issued an emergency order suspending the license of 68-year-old Donald Lamoureaux pending a hearing before the board.
According to a news release from Conner Eldridge, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, Lamoureaux practiced family medicine in Horseshoe Bend and Dexter, Mo., and also worked at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical facility in West Plains, Mo.
He was arrested in West Plains on Friday at a hotel where an undercover officer posing as the 4-year-old girl's mother had arranged to meet the doctor, the release says.
"The conduct at issue in this case is frightening," Eldridge said in the news release. "The threat of abuse to young and innocent children is serious, ever-present, and very real."
According to an affidavit filed in federal court, officers with the Fort Smith Police Department began communicating with Lamoureaux last month in an Internet chat room called "OlderForYounger."
The officers were posing as a mother offering her 4-year-old daughter for sexual exploitation, the affidavit says.
Through private Internet messages outside the chat room, Lamoureaux said he wanted to meet the mother and her daughter at a cabin in Mountain Home, according to the affidavit.
"Lamoureaux expressed in many conversations that he wanted to 'teach' the 4 year old minor how to have sex," the affidavit says. "Specifically, in one conversation, Lamoureaux asked the [undercover officer] what was off limits as far as sexual activity with the 4-year-old minor."
Lamoureaux told the officer he didn't want to have intercourse with the girl until she was 9 years old but wanted to abuse her sexually in other ways, the affidavit says.
Lamoureaux later arranged to meet the officer at the hotel in West Plains, the affidavit says.
At Lamoureaux's request, the officer set up a bank account, the affidavit says. Lamoureaux deposited $300 in the account to pay for expenses associated with the hotel, as well as for sex toys and gas money, according to the affidavit.
Lamoureaux previously appeared before the medical board in October 2007 after he was removed from a clinic owned by White River Medical Center in Batesville over pornography that had been discovered on the personal laptop that he used to access the hospital network.
Part of the hospital's concern, he told the board, was that the file-sharing program he had used to download the pornography could have endangered the confidentiality of hospital medical records.
Lamoureaux acknowledged that the pornography was his and that he had downloaded it over a number of years. He said it was adult pornography and compared it with images available on DirecTV and pay-per-view.
The board didn't take action against Lamoureaux at that time.
On Monday, Lamoureaux made an initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Ford in Fort Smith. He was being held in the Sebastian County jail. Bail has not been set.
According to the news release, the criminal case is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's investigations division, the Fort Smith Police Department, the West Plains Police Department and the Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force.
Metro on 02/10/2015