A New Bedford doctor was sentenced to 12 years in state prison for raping a boy he met and groomed online.

“The defendant was convicted of extremely disturbing and demented conduct involving a very vulnerable fourteen-year-old boy,” Bristol District Attorney Thomas Quinn III said in a statement. “He preyed on the victim by exchanging pornographic pictures that resulted in the defendant raping the victim in a motel. The sentence imposed by the court was well deserved.”

A Bristol Superior Court jury in Fall River on Tuesday convicted Sujan Kayastha, 42, of Dartmouth, on several charges related to rape of a child and child pornography. The judge sentenced him on Tuesday to 12 years in prison to be followed by five years of supervised probation.

Prosecutors say that Kayastha, who at the time worked as a medical doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, met his male victim online in September 2018 and exchanged nude photographs and videos, even as he knew that it was a minor child.

Kayastha escalated the crime to the real world on Dec. 6 of that year, prosecutors say, by driving to Attleboro and picking the boy up from a group home. He then drove the child to the Shangri-La Motel in Seekonk and paid the boy $200 “to engage in a sex act with him.”

The crime was unearthed when an employee at the group home reported suspected sexual exploitation of the boy to Attleboro Police, according to the DA’s office. Investigators uncovered the online communications between Kayastha and the boy as well as the child pornography.