An Old Forge man accused of possessing child sexual abuse material now faces more than 400 counts of the crime.<\/p>\n
Sterling Albert Barnes, 27, had faced eight counts of possession of child sexual abuse material. Investigators initially charged the Oak Street resident Nov. 20.<\/p>\n
The Lackawanna County district attorney\u2019s office withdrew the charges Thursday and filed a second complaint reflecting 450 felony counts of possessing material including still photographs and videos.<\/p>\n
The district attorney\u2019s office and the Pennsylvania Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force investigated the case.<\/p>\n
According to a criminal complaint:<\/p>\n
Google alerted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to images uploaded depicting children in sexual acts. Later, Dropbox submitted a similar alert and both reports were forwarded to the district attorney\u2019s office. Detectives determined the accounts belonged to Barnes.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 20, investigators searched Barnes\u2019 residence and arrested him.<\/p>\n
Barnes admitted to viewing, uploading and sometimes paying for child sexual abuse material. He told investigators he tried to stop, but couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
A search of Barnes\u2019 cellphone yielded chats in which he sought child sexual abuse material, as well as images of child sexual abuse in his gallery and deleted photos. A forensic analysis later yielded hundreds of files depicting minors involved in sexual activity. Examples include a video depicting a minor female in the bathroom and another video involving a minor and a dog, according to the complaint.<\/p>\n
Barnes remains at the Lackawanna County Prison in lieu of $50,000 bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 18 before District Judge Christopher J. Szewczyk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Old Forge man accused of possessing child sexual abuse material now faces more than 400 counts of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[202,201,182,139,16790,28,178,180,179,181],"class_list":{"0":"post-60288","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","9":"tag-lackawanna-county","10":"tag-local-news","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-old-forge","13":"tag-pennsylvania","14":"tag-scranton","15":"tag-scranton-headlines","16":"tag-scranton-news","17":"tag-top-stories-stt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60288","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=60288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}