Delaware County, Pennsylvania's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has received a $600,000 federal grant, with U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan saying the unit distinguished itself across the United States since its creation in 2000.
This award, added to another grant from the U.S. Justice Appropriations Acts, makes for $1.4 million in federal money given to the task force.
"Children are unquestionably the most vulnerable people," Meehan told a press conference announcing the new grant. "They can easily be accessed by someone who can pretend to be somebody else." Meehan himself had been Delaware County's district attorney when the task force got its first federal grant, at its founding at the end of 1999.
Indeed, the night before the new federal grant was announced, the task force was living up to its reputation, provoking the arrest of a 74-year-old man for trying to make a date online for oral sex with an underage Netizen, according to published reports.
Task force member Michele Deery got two complaints about Robert Lee Leavitt, the second of which came in May, when he used the same screen name, described himself as a "discreet bisexual guy," and offered to meet his would-be partner at a railroad station in Radnor, after which Deery traced the screen name last week to an account Leavitt paid, the reports said. Then, with Leavitt believing he was going to meet a 16-year-old boy, he met Deery and another investigator and was hit with attempted prostitution charges among others.
Leavitt had already served two years' probation over a 2001 arrest and guilty plea to corruption of minors and unlawful contact, and he had been required to register as a sex offender with Pennsylvania state police as a result, the reports said. He is free on bond with a preliminary hearing set for June 15.
