A suspended Lehigh County 911 dispatcher is accused of raping a girl last year in Northampton County, according to authorities.<\/p>\n
Austin Kern, 26, was arraigned Tuesday on charges alleging he sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl in March 2025 in his Lehigh Township home. Kern is charged with rape of a child, statutory sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault of a child, corruption of minors and simple assault. He was sent to Northampton County Prison on $250,000 bail.<\/p>\n
Lehigh Township police wrote in court documents that Kern raped the girl while she was staying at the home for a visit.<\/p>\n
She told her family about the assault, and she went to a nearby hospital for a sexual assault evaluation, police said. The sexual assault kit was sent to a state police crime lab for testing. DNA found on her clothes at the time of the assault likely matched that of Kern\u2019s, according to court documents.<\/p>\n
Kern was suspended without pay after his arrest, which is Lehigh County policy, according to a county spokesperson.<\/p>\n
Kern did not have an attorney listed Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s note: This story was updated to correct Kern\u2019s first name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A suspended Lehigh County 911 dispatcher is accused of raping a girl last year in Northampton County, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,202,433,20758,182,139,434,28,432],"class_list":["post-311917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-lehigh-county","tag-lehigh-township","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-northampton-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}