ARVADA, Colo. -- A man who was convicted of molesting five young girls, who were between 4 and 6 years old, during sleepovers at his Arvada home was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison, the Jefferson County District Attorney announced Monday.

In November, Scott Allen Thompson, 29, had pleaded guilty to sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust in a pattern of conduct.

Thompson is a father of two and often threw parties for the neighborhood kids and encouraged his children's friends to spend the night, authorities said.

Sometimes he would have the girls model underwear for him and take photos or he would take photos of the sleeping children posed in sexually explicit ways, prosecutors said.

After a 6-year-old girl told her parents what had happened to her, Arvada police detectives seized Thompson's computer and found more than 68,000 pornographic photos of children.

As part of the investigation, detectives cropped many of the photos and took them to schools hoping to find someone who recognized the children.

With many of the photos it was not possible to determine whether the pictures were taken by Thompson or downloaded off the Internet, authorities said.

Investigators were able to identify three more girls and believe that there are at least two other victims in the metro area whom they were not able to identify.

At sentencing, prosecutor Matt Durkin argued that Thompson was a sexually violent predator even though he didn't fit the technical legal criteria.

"This guy used his own children as bait to lure other children to his house to be sexually assaulted," Durkin said.

District Court Judge Brian Boatright had many things to consider before imposing the lengthy prison sentence, including that the Probation Department found Thompson at a high risk to reoffend.