EAST CAMERON TOWNSHIP - A township man faces charges involving possession of child pornography discovered during an undercover police operation in February 2010
State police Tpr. Ronald Zanella charged Ryan K. McCormick, 24, of 5271 Upper Road, Shamokin RR with sexual abuse of children and possession of child pornography following an incident on Feb. 12, 2010.
McCormick was arraigned on the charges Feb. 22 and placed in Northumberland County Prison on $20,000 bail, but has since been released.
The criminal complaint was recently released from Magisterial District Judge Hugh Jones's office. A preliminary hearing on the matter is scheduled for Wednesday, April 6.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Zanella, Milton Police Detective Todd Ulrich was conducting an undercover investigation into the sharing of child pornography on a peer-to-peer computer network.
After doing a keyword search on "preteen", he found a computer with a public Internet protocol and 146 files to share.
Ulrich then initiated three successful file download, which when opened were images of child pornography. The detective then executed a search warrant on the Internet service provider the computer subscribed to which determined the computer was at the Upper Road residence.
Since the address was in the jurisdiction of state police, they were called into the investigation.
A search warrant for the residence was then acquired from Magisterial District Judge John Gembic in April, and police arrived at McCormick's residence, where he was present with his father.
In an interview with authorities, Ryan McCormick admitted to searching for and viewing child pornography. He said that he was sexually stimulated with the images at first, but then later became less interested and continued to search out of boredom.
Cpl. Thomas Trusal, of the Computer Crimes Unit, conducted a forensic audit of the computer's hard drive and found several other images and movies on the hard drive.
On Feb. 2, the images were examined by a doctor at the Child Advocacy Center, Northumberland, who determined that the females in several of the images were under 18 years of age, and the rest were questionable because of the size of the image being too small to tell.